Ajit Karn
On Friday, the city of Memphis released a video showing police officers beating Tyre Nichols. The officers held the black driver down and repeatedly hit him with their fists, boots, and batons as he screamed for his mother and begged, “I’m just trying to go home.” On the video, the officers are also seen holding Tyre Nichols down while they do this.
The video is full of violent scenes where the policemen, who are also Black, chase and punch Nichols before leaving him on the ground propped up against a police cruiser while they fist-bump and celebrate their actions. On the video, Nichols is also seen being chased by the police.
The video was shown to the public a day after the police officers who killed Nichols were charged with murder in his death. The upsetting pictures of yet another unarmed black man being shot and killed by police have brought up hard questions about why deadly confrontations with law enforcement keep happening, even though people have asked for change many times. In the movie, police officers hit and yelled at a 29-year-old FedEx worker for three minutes while hitting him very hard. The police killing of Nichols was immediately compared to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Floyd was another black man in Minneapolis whose death by suffocation at the hands of a white police officer was caught on camera. When people heard that Nichols had been killed by police, they immediately thought of George Floyd.
Tyre Nichols came from where?
The Associated Press says that Nichols was the father of a 4-year-old child and that his family knew him as a passionate skateboarder and nature photographer from Sacramento, California. Nichols is also the name of his son. He got to Memphis just in time to avoid the pandemic, and he started working for FedEx, which is one of the most important companies in the city, soon after. The New York Times said in an article that Nichols had worked for the company for about nine months before he died.
At Nichols’s memorial service, his step-grandmother, Lucille Washington, said that he was “one of those people who made everyone around them happy.”
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Body cam footage from the police shows a violent arrest.
On January 8, police said that Nichols was arrested after a traffic stop that led to two fights with officers. During the first argument, Nichols ran away from the traffic stop, the police said.
As a mom, all I can think about is Tyre calling for his mom and her heavy grief that she was not there for him.
He was a man, a son, a father who did not deserve a horrific death.
Black Lives Matter. https://t.co/AVgu0R3FgK #TyreNichols #BlackLivesMatter
— Christy Clark (@ChristyClarkNC) January 28, 2023
