Memphis city releases deadly police beating video
The US city of Memphis on Friday released graphic video footage depicting the fatal police assault of a 29year-old Black man, sparking small protests against police brutality in a number of US cities but none that flared into the violence that officials had feared.
Five Memphis officers, all also Black, were charged with second-degree murder in the beating of Tyre Nichols, who died in hospital on January 10 three days after being stopped on suspicion of reckless driving. The lengthy video footage from police body cameras shows a group of officers detaining Nichols, attempting to take him down with the use of a Taser, then giving chase as he evades them.
Subsequent segments - the footage runs about an hour in total, and is audio-only in parts - show Nichols crying out for his mother, and moaning as officers
repeatedly kick and punch him.
Addressing an emotional press conference earlier on Friday, the victim’s mother Row
Vaughn Wells called out the officers who she said beat her son ‘to a pulp’, telling them: “You disgraced your own families when
you did this.”
President Joe Biden, who has joined local officials in calling for protests to remain peaceful, spoke with Wells on Friday to offer his condolences and commend ‘the family’s courage and strength’. The slain man’s mother was ‘obviously in enormous pain’, Biden said, adding that she had ‘made a very strong plea’ for peaceful protests.
The father of a four-year-old son, Nichols worked for Fedex, loved skateboarding and taking photos, and had a tattoo of his mother’s name on his arm.
“My heart just breaks,” Wells told the news conference. “For a mother to know that their child was calling them in their need, and I wasn’t there for him.”
“My son was a beautiful soul,” Wells said. “He was a good boy. No one’s perfect. But he was damn near it.”
Protests in Memphis, Washington, New York City, Philadelphia, Atlanta and a handful of other cities on Friday evening were small and largely peaceful.
In downtown Memphis, around 50 protesters gathered at the central Martyrs Park to mark the video’s release, later blocking a main road as they marched and chanted ‘No Justice, No Peace’ and ‘Say His Name: Tyre Nichols’.
The White House said that senior staff had briefed the mayors of more than a dozen cities, including Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia, on federal assistance in case of protests.
My heart just breaks... For a mother to know that their child was calling them in their need ROWVAUGHN WELLS