Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
‘FINALLY PEOPLE SEEM TO UNDERSTAND’
Ashley Quinones started protesting months ago. Since her husband was shot and killed by police in Minnesota last September, she’s been to city council meetings and state commissions.
She’s protested on street corners, once shutting down streets and a light rail line.
Sometimes others joined her, but mostly she did it by herself. She’s no longer alone.
“Finally,” she said. “I’ve been out here for nine months by myself. Now finally people seem to understand what our families are going through.”
Her husband, 30-year-old Brian Quinones-Rosario, who was Puerto Rican, was chased by police for driving erratically. He was shot and killed by officers seconds after getting out of his car; he was carrying a kitchen knife, and officers said he lunged at them.
Authorities alleged he was suicidal and provoked the police to shoot him, The Associated Press previously reported. His wife denies it, and says he was calm in the moments before the shooting. In February, the Hennepin county attorney declined to file charges against the officers and said their use of deadly force was “necessary, proportional, and objectively reasonable.”
But Quinones, who has filed a lawsuit against the cities involved, said they failed to follow their protocol and reacted out of fear, instead of deescalating the situation.
“They are afraid of black and brown bodies,” she said.
“George Floyd is the face of thousands of murders. People are not burning the city down over just George Floyd. He is the straw that broke the camel’s back and opened up the eyes of people who weren’t paying attention to the thousands before him.”
She wants her husband’s case reopened and re-examined, and she believes every other police killing should be, too. She said her white friends now cannot look away: “Now, you see it. What are you going to do about it?”
Since the nationwide protests have erupted, she has joined every day. She was a guest speaker at 15 events in a single week. She had been laid off from a car rental company during the shutdown caused by covid-19. Now she’s devoting every minute of her life to this cause — even, she said, if it consumes her and she loses everything.
“I will be a homeless, car-less, jobless protester if that’s what it takes because I’m not accepting it. I haven’t accepted it and I’m not accepting it,” she said. “They ruined my life. Overnight everything was gone, and now I have to live with what someone else says my life is.”