Some joy, some sadness
Bay Area families whose relatives were killed by police react
Cephus “Uncle Bobby” X Johnson was at work in Silicon Valley when he heard a verdict was reached in the trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin. He had a flashback to sitting in a courtroom a decade ago, waiting for the jury to read the verdict in the trial of a BART officer who shot and killed his nephew, Oscar Grant III.
Anxiously, he watched the judge read the jury’s verdict Tuesday. Then a powerful emotion swept over him.
Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts in the murder of George Floyd.
“I was filled with joy, that the verdict came back that way,” Johnson said. “I was cautiously optimistic but for that to happen, it was huge. I didn’t think they would give him all three, but I’m glad they did.”
For Bay Area families
whose relatives have died at the hands of police, the verdict thousands of miles away filled them with a range of emotions, from joy to rage that in the cases of their loved ones, no one has been held accountable. And it brought about a sadness knowing that nothing would bring back George Floyd, or their family members.
Johnson was happy the trial and verdict were shown on national television. No cameras were allowed in the courtroom during the trial of BART Officer Johannes Mehserle, who was captured on cellphone footage shooting Grant in the back, as he laid unarmed on a BART platform in Oakland on New Year’s Day 2009. The jury found Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter, a lesser charge.
“If the world would have been able to see our case, it would have been just as significant as this was,” Johnson said. “But the world was denied the opportunity. They didn’t want the cameras in there to see the truth.”
In the Bay Area alone, hundreds of people have died at the hands of police. Between 2015 and June 2020, at least 110 people were killed, including an outsized percentage of Black residents, who make up only 7% of the combined population of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, but account for a staggering 27% of those killed by police.
Until this past year, with criminal filings against officers in San Francisco and Alameda counties, Mehserle was the only officer in recent memory ever charged.
“I see it as a continuum in the path of holding officers accountable,” said civil rights attorney John Burris has represented numerous victim families including Grant’s and other unarmed Black men shot by police. “This was another step along the way, a big step.”
When the verdict was read, Rick Perez was in his 16-wheel big rig, headed east on the Bay Bridge listening to KCBS radio.
“I heard the verdict, I was tooting my loud air horns, heading back to Oakland,” he said.
Perez called the jury’s decision “bittersweet.” When his son, Richard “Pedie” Perez, was shot and killed by a Richmond police officer in September 2014 he joined a “club that nobody wants to belong to.”
“It doesn’t bring George or none of the victims back,” he said, but he’s noticed a change in how juries view police officers. “It’s a start, these stories are happening so much (people’s) minds are changing because they probably know somebody who is a victim of this scenario.”
“I think a lot of cops are fearful that something like this can happen to them,” he said. “We give them the power of life and death and they abuse it.”
Across the Atlantic Ocean, Ebele Okobi was standing in her kitchen in London when the verdict was read. She said she felt “rage, and enormous sadness.” She thought of her brother.
Her brother, Chineda Okobi, was walking down El Camino Real in Millbrae in October 2018, when San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies stopped him, on a report he was acting oddly and allegedly wandering into traffic. Okobi wasn’t armed, and walked away from the deputies, who stunned him with a Taser until his heart gave out.
“I knew that the story that some people would want to tell is a comforting story — that justice was served. But a man was murdered by having the life crushed out of him in front of an audience,” Ebele Okobi said of the police killing of Floyd. “His killing was recorded, and the officer crushing him to death looked straight into the lens because he knew that killing Black people is considered a victimless crime.”
She said she worries society, especially White people, will view the guilty verdict as a victory and it will be used to look away from police killings that continue. During the trial, she pointed out, police in a nearby city shot and killed Daunte Wright.
“One guilty verdict out of tens of thousands of deaths changes absolutely nothing about a system which is working exactly the way it was intended,” Ebele Okobi said. “This one conviction isn’t justice, and I’m angry that the bar is so low for Black people.”
The San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office cleared the deputies of any criminal wrongdoing, which has thrust Ebele Okobi into helping fund a candidate to run against District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe in 2022.
Family members of people killed by police in the Bay Area saw the swift actions of Minneapolis police in firing Chauvin and prosecutors charging him and vigorously prosecuting the officer as a glimpse of the government advocating for justice. Some families in the Bay Area wait years before the local DA decides on whether to charge the officer.
“For me and my husband and my daughter we saw the attorney general take action right away, they fired him right away, we felt like right away there was a reaction,” said Taun Hall, the mother of Miles Hall. “With us, the DA hasn’t even given her ruling yet.”
Miles Hall, 23, was shot and killed in June 2019 by Walnut Creek police while having a mental health breakdown. The city reached a settlement of $4 million with his family, but his mother doesn’t believe the officers have been held accountable for their actions.
“It’s awful, I feel like we don’t have a lot of resolution in Miles’ death,” she said.
Taun Hall said the jury’s verdict in Minnesota does offer a level of justice for her family, and others who have lost loved ones to police violence. “We are happy this is on such a national level, that change is happening and that hopefully going forward officers will be more accountable in knowing that they can’t just take lives away, even when people are watching,” said Hall.
Civil rights attorney Adante Pointer said he is awaiting the sentencing from the judge.
“I welcome the conviction, I’m happy to see it, I know far too well it’s not just about crime it’s about crime and punishment. We won’t really have a true sense of what justice looks like for George Floyd, the community there and the nation as a whole until the judge bangs his gavel and gives Chauvin a lengthy prison sentence.”
Johnson and the Grant family know this too well. In November 2010, the judge in the Mehserle case put aside a gun enhancement that would have added 10 years to the former BART cop’s prison time and sentenced Mehserle to the low end of the sentencing range. With credit for time served, the officer was sentenced to 11 months, all of it spent in county jail.
“Every little bit of joy we might of had with the guilty verdict was deflated and taken away,” Johnson said. “There was no victory. My nephew was murdered and no one was really held accountable.”