Blake, a rare police shooting survivor, tells his own story

KENOSHA, Wis. — Demonstrations against police violence have been filled with the chants of victims’ names: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner. In recent days, a new name — Jacob Blake — has been called out in protests across the country.

In that list, though, Blake, a Black man who was repeatedly shot in the back by a white police officer in Kenosha, is also set apart. Unlike so many of the people who have become grim symbols for a movement, Blake survived and has begun to tell his own story.

“Your life — and not only just your life, your legs, something that you need to move around and move forward in life — could be taken from you like this, man,” Blake says from his hospital bed, snapping his fingers for emphasis, in a video released over the weekend. In the video, he speaks publicly for the first time about what happened to him. His injuries are severe, and his family says he was paralyzed from the waist down in the shooting last month.

In the video, which was recorded by an activist from New York who distributed it on social media, Blake describes his injuries, which he says left him with staples in his back and stomach.

“Every 24 hours, it’s pain — it’s nothing but pain,” Blake says. “It hurts to breathe; it hurts to sleep. It hurts to move from side to side. It hurts to eat.”

Shermaine Laster, the activist, said he showed up unannounced at the Milwaukee hospital where Blake is being

treated and was meeting Blake for the first time.

For demonstrators seeking broad changes to American policing, the prospect of Blake’s presenting the public with a personal voice to his experience was encouraging.

“My son is gone,” said Monique

West, whose 18-year-old son, Ty’Rese West, was shot and killed in 2019 by a police officer in Racine County, not far from Kenosha. “He’s not here to tell nothing. There’s only two stories — either the officer or the person that’s gone.”

A Kenosha officer, Rusten Sheskey, fired seven times on Aug. 30 at Blake, who was trying to get into a car. The shooting was captured by a neighbor on a disturbing video that quickly drew

outrage on social media. It set off sometimes destructive demonstrations in Kenosha and quickly became a topic in the presidential race, drawing visits from President Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Cortez Rice, a nephew of George Floyd, the man who was killed by police in Minneapolis in May, said Blake’s own words about what had happened to him would hold a unique value.

“Jacob’s got the chance — he’s going to get to speak,” Rice said.