With more than a dozen candidates still clambering for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, each trying to distinguish themselves while knocking their opponent, much attention has been paid to the campaign claims of noted Detroit neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson — particularly the veracity of claims he has made recently about his once explosive rage as a young man and teen.
Specific questions have come up about Carson’s latest claims that he once went after his mother with a hammer and how at age 14 he stabbed another young man while arguing over a radio — the young man was identified as a classmate named “Bob” in Carson’s 1990 biography Gifted Hands, though he now claims that was a pseudonym meant to protect the identity of a relative.
Because Carson grew up in Detroit and gained such fame as a surgeon, The Free Press has interviewed both Carson and his mother Sonya for stories on several occasions over the years. We looked back at some of those articles — in our publication and others — to try to bring some clarity to the claims currently being brought into question.
Carson has cited the two claims several times in the past 27 years. And while some of the details of Carson’s recent recollections haven’t always tracked, the basic scenarios of the incidents seems to fit the larger narrative:
A May 15, 1988, Detroit Free Press magazine article written by Antoinette Martin speaks of how Carson, around the age of 14, once tried to stab a young man. And a May 11, 1997, article by Parade magazine quotes his mother as saying it did happen — but the young man’s belt buckle kept him from being hurt and kept Carson from going to jail. Carson himself recalls the same thing in a Dec. 25, 1988, Parade piece.
As for Carson’s reported claim in recent interviews that he once tried to strike his mother with a hammer, a passage of the Detroit Free Press magazine article describes a disagreement that showed his mother being the one reaching for a hammer:
His mother, still lively but arthritic and living with heart problems in Inkster, remembers the time she and Bennie had a spat over clothes he wanted for school. He raised his hand; she reached for the hammer she had out while working on the house. The two might really have tangled, she says, had not her older son Curtis, now a mechanical engineer in Indiana, stepped between them. “I’m still working on my temper,” she says, “but God seems to have done Bennie a really big favor.”
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