Photograph: Eli Hiller/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock Dozens of protesters accumulated stories that detail how they were terrorized by police.Ī woman writes Ma’Khia Bryant’s name in chalk in Columbus in April. The organizing landscape has drastically changed in the capital city since the summer of 2020, when protests surged in solidarity with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others despite an escalating pandemic. The family has also considered holding a march or action in remembrance of Ma’Khia with local organizers, but have not made any plans for fear of backlash and counter-protests. “People always need one bad actor, but if they can’t see how the entire system worked collectively to back her into a corner, then we are not going to get the support that we need.” “I think what people do is dumb down the situation to those 10 seconds before Ma’Khia was killed and I think that that’s not fair to her,” she said. Meanwhile, Ja’Niah, Martin said, has noted that the protests and demonstrations in support of her elder sister have paled in comparison with those of George Floyd last summer. Martin and Hammonds are now providing weekly testimony to prosecutors to give history of the threats and attacks from the former foster children of Angela Moore that preceded the shooting. The environment had become so contentious that Ja’Niah Bryant called police one month before the fatal shooting.įollowing an investigation conducted by the bureau of criminal investigations, the Ohio attorney general, David Yost, ultimately decided to send the case to special prosecutors for a grand jury review. Michelle Martin, the Bryant family’s attorney, says the women – both in their 20s – bullied and berated the sisters and mocked Ma’Khia’s speech impediment. The women involved in the altercation are now known as the former foster children of Moore, who were often left alone with the Bryant sisters unsupervised while she was at work. I know what happened the night of the evening of this incident, and that’s what I was going to discuss with them before a videotape got out, making my granddaughter looking like she is a monster,” Hammonds then said. But the Bryant family was less than comforted. ‘ A rogue police force ’Ĭolumbus police released the body-cam footage in the immediate hours following Ma’Khia’s shooting via livestreamed press conference, calling it an effort in “transparency”. That has left the Columbus police department devoid of any real accountability, and in fact more emboldened than ever as the city’s largest expense. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Imagesīut months after the city erupted in protests for George Floyd, some combination of apathy, unease and frustration has led the same local lawmakers who publicly decried Minneapolis police to forget the vast number of victims of police killings in their own backyards. Data from the research collaborative Mapping Police Violence indicates that since 2013, among all police departments across the US, officers in Columbus have killed their city’s youth at a higher rate than most other police forces in the country.Ī mourner holds up a funeral program during services for Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio, on 30 April. Haynes, who was white, was the only non-Black victim. In that period, five other juveniles have been killed in similar altercations with police use of deadly force: 13-year-old Tyre King in 2016 16-year-olds Julius Ervin Tate Jr and Joseph Edward Haynes in 2018 and 15-year-old Abdirahman Salad and 17-year-old Joseph C Jewell III in 2020. While Ma’Khia’s case received national attention, she’s actually one of several children who have died at the hands of police in Ohio’s capital city between 20 alone. Ma’Khia was taken to Mt Carmel East hospital in critical condition and pronounced dead soon after. “She’s just a fucking kid, man!” exclaimed a man, later established as Ma’Khia’s biological father who had gathered with other bystanders including Jeanene Hammonds, the girls’ grandmother, in the driveway. Body-cam footage would reveal that Bryant was clutching a knife, making her the only person visibly armed until Nicholas Reardon, a 23-year-old officer who only joined the force just a year and a half earlier, arrived at the scene and within seconds fired four shots in quick succession – all of which found their target, Bryant. According to early reports, the altercation that prompted a call to police involved Bryant and two women in their early 20s, and had escalated outside the foster home of Angela Moore, where Ma’Khia and her younger sister, Ja’Niah, were placed.
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