Memphis police on Friday night released graphic footage of the brutal arrest of Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old driver whose stop on Jan. 7 turned into a brutal beating by five officers, an event that ultimately led to the young man’s death in hospital days later.

US President Joe Biden spoke by phone Friday with RoweVaughn Wells and Rodney Wells, the mother and stepfather of Tyre Nichols, sending them his “personal condolences” and “praising their courage and strength,” the US president said hours before announcing release. video recording of the arrest, which took place on January 7 in Memphis, Tennessee.

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis warned that a video showing the arrest of Tyre Nichols for a simple traffic violation is “comparable, if not worse,” to the 1991 brutal arrest of Rodney King. Acquitted a year later, of the four police officers involved, provoked unprecedented riots in Los Angeles

Footage from police body cameras and street cameras shows officers surrounding Tyre Nichols at an intersection, asking him to get off the wheel and put his hands up.

Agents pull Nichols from the driver’s seat of his car as he yells, “Shit, I didn’t do anything… I’m just trying to get home,” and force him to the ground before ordering him to lie on his stomach and spraying him with an irritant spray .

Although the suspect is lying on his side and the agent is on top of him, he does not hesitate to lie on his stomach. The officer threatens to use a taser, and after about a minute of struggle, the young man gets up and starts to run, one of the policemen fires a taser, but he runs away.

About 7 minutes in, the cops catch up with the suspect in a residential area, and things get extremely violent from there. Two agents can be seen holding him down, a third kicking him and a fourth hitting him with what appears to be a club or pole, before the other Nichols also hits him.

Pinned to the ground, Tyree Nichols screams “Mommy!!!” several times. When he gets up, one policeman punches him in the face, another kicks him in the face, and another one hits him with a baton.

Agents finally handcuff Tyre Nichols and put him in a police car. He fought the pain for nearly 20 minutes before he became unresponsive.

On January 7, five policemen stopped the driver on suspicion of careless driving, but from the very beginning the policemen were very aggressive. The video doesn’t make it clear why things turned violent so quickly. After the brutal beating, Trai Nichols was rushed to the hospital because he complained that he couldn’t breathe. He was hospitalized in serious condition and died in the hospital on January 10.

A HARD CASE TO UNDERSTAND

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents Tyra’s family, watched the body camera footage with the victim’s family days before it was released and compared the horrific scene to the 1991 beating of Rodney King, which sparked outrage. protests in Los Angeles.

“No mother should have to go through what I’m going through, no mother should have to lose her child as brutally as I lost my child,” Tyra Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, said Friday.

The five Memphis police officers involved in the stop of the young driver – Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith – have been fired and charged with second-degree murder. They are also facing additional charges of official crimes, oppression and deprivation of liberty under aggravating circumstances. Four of the five posted bail and were released Friday morning.

The cause of Tyre’s death has not been released, and the incident is being investigated by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the US Department of Justice.

Protests are expected following the release of the images, and the family of Tyre Nichols, as well as President Joe Biden, have called for any demonstrations to remain peaceful.

All the actors in this scandal, both the victim and the five police officers, are African-American. Memphis, a city of 628,000, has nearly 65% ​​black residents.

TYRE NICHOLS, THE NEXT FIGURE OF THE AMERICAN JUSTICE MOVEMENT?

The footage has every chance of turning Nichols, a father of a 4-year-old child who enjoys skateboarding and recently enrolled in photography classes, into the next figure in the American movement for racial justice, Reuters writes.

Raised in Sacramento, California, Nichols moved to the Memphis area before the coronavirus pandemic, where he lived with his mother and stepfather and worked at FedEx, taking a break each day to come home for a meal his mother cooked.

President Joe Biden spoke Friday afternoon with RoweVaughn Wells and Rodney Wells, Nichols’ stepfather, to express their condolences, the White House said, adding that they are coordinating with the appropriate government agencies if the protests turn violent.

Antonio Romanucci, another attorney for Nichols’ family, said Friday in an interview with National Public Radio that Nichols was a strong supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and “basically died for his own cause.”

The family’s lawyers asked the police department to disband the SCORPION special unit, which focused on violent street crimes, to which part of the police was assigned.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday announced a federal civil rights investigation into Nichols’ death, while law enforcement agencies in some major cities, including New York, Atlanta and Washington, said they were bracing for possible protests after the video aired.

The White House said it held a conference call with the mayors of several cities to update them on federal preparations pending the release of the video, and asked the mayors to stay in close contact in the coming days.

(source: news.ro)