San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
10 years later, friends haunted by fatal BART police shooting
jFernando Anicete Jr. walked out of the movie theater long before the credits rolled.
He couldn’t finish watching “The Hate U Give,” a film released in October about a black teenager who witnesses her friend getting shot and killed by a white police officer during a traffic stop.
It reminded Anicete of the way his childhood friend Oscar Grant died.
“I started getting mad, getting sad, ’cause it brings all the things up,” Anicete said. “It felt like it was the same thing to me watching it. Anything like that pops up, and it brings it back.”
Anicete was there a decade ago, on Jan. 1, 2009, when Grant was fatally shot in the back by then-BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle at Fruitvale Station in Oakland.
Grant was 22, the father of a young daughter. Mehserle, who testified that he shot the unarmed Grant accidentally while intending to shock him with a Taser, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Video recordings of the
shooting by BART passengers went viral and sparked protests in the streets of Oakland, where people chanted, “I’m Oscar Grant!”
To many, Grant became a symbol, a face on murals and T-shirts, with his death uniting people against police brutality. To his friends, Grant was the glue that kept them together — and his death weakened their bond.
Life hasn’t been the same without Grant.
This is the time of year that people make plans to celebrate the dawn of a new year with friends and family. But for Grant’s friends who were on the station platform, like Anicete and Nigel Bryson, this is the time when they steel themselves against the memories.
“We don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve no more,” Bryson said. “Sometimes, I’ll be the one who would like try to put things together and have a good time, but it don’t be the same. Don’t nobody want to celebrate New Year’s Eve.”
“It’s just always sad,” Anicete added. “It don’t go away.”
Anicete, Bryson and Grant had gone to San Francisco that night with Bryson’s brother, Jack Bryson Jr., as well as Michael Greer, Carlos Reyes, Johntue Caldwell, Kris Rafferty and others. In an interview with The Chronicle, Anicete and Nigel Bryson discussed Grant’s death extensively for the first time, describing trauma they’ve battled for a decade.
They’re tired. They sometimes have trouble sleeping. They not only had to witness their friend be killed, but were then handcuffed and held for hours at BART headquarters. The episode keeps them paranoid, they said, worried about what could happen the next time they’re stopped by a police officer.
Making matters worse, two of Grant’s friends, Caldwell and Rafferty, were later slain, both victims of street crimes that remain unsolved.
“They’ve been suffering. They never got post-traumatic stress” treatment, said Jack Bryson, father of Nigel and Jack Jr. The latter “wakes up out of his sleep still. He screams.”
Nigel Bryson can’t shake the image of smoke rising from Grant’s back after the bullet entered his body. He recalls asking his brother, who was next to Grant, “Did Oscar get shot?”
“I feel like the more I talk about it, the more (I’ll) deal with it,” said Nigel Bryson, 28. “Now I’m getting older, it’s like you gotta talk about that.”
The Bryson brothers were raised in Chicago before moving to Palma Ceia, a West Hayward neighborhood, with their mother. They met Grant there and hung out at Palma Ceia Park, which the friends called Four Trees because of the four trees where they used to sit. Anicete met the Brysons through Grant. The boys played baseball together. They called each other cousins.
“No one got into their group,” Jack Bryson said. “They were really cliquelike, strong.”
If one was in trouble, they all went through it — like on New Year’s Day 10 years ago.
They say Grant was trying to be a peacemaker when he was killed, calming his friends and saying repeatedly, “We’re going home tonight.”
The trouble began about 2 a.m., when riders reported a fight between Grant and a second man on a Dublin-Pleasanton train. At Fruitvale Station, a police officer, Tony Pirone — who was later fired for his actions — pulled Grant and some of his friends off the train and had them sit against a wall.
Pirone, exchanging profanities with the men, pushed Greer into the wall and took him to the ground with a leg sweep. Grant protested and stood up, prompting Pirone to rush up to him and pull him to the ground as well. Soon, Pirone ordered Mehserle to arrest Grant and Greer. That’s when the shooting happened.
“When Oscar died it was like a dream,” Bryson said, looking down at his hands and shaking his head in disbelief. “It didn’t seem real. That’s crazy. It was real.”
Grant “was trying to be cool,” said Anicete, who had gotten off the train to find out why his friends were being detained.
At about the time of the shooting, another BART officer tackled Anicete, believing — wrongly — that he had thrown a phone. It was actually Caldwell.
The Brysons, Reyes, Greer and Anicete were taken to BART police headquarters. Nigel Bryson and Anicete said they were handcuffed and had to sit on the floor for hours. They asked for water. They said officers laughed at them.
None of the men was charged with a crime. In 2014, BART paid $175,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the five men.
Bryson avoids riding BART. The last time Anicete did a few weeks ago, he said he was approached by a BART officer. He isn’t sure why.
“I just put up my hands. I’m real paranoid,” said Anicete, who was wearing his security uniform from his job at a Facebook office in San Francisco.
The officer asked Anicete why he put his hands up.
“I’m like, ‘Why you think? Why you ask me a stupid question like that?’ ” Anicete said he responded.
The officer, Anicete said, asked for identification and let him go on his way.
Like Grant, Nigel Bryson and Anicete fathered daughters. Bryson’s two daughters are 1 and 3, and Anicete’s two girls are 2 and 8.
“I don’t know what life would be like without them,” Bryson said. “I can’t imagine not raising my kids.”
Bryson, who is a rapper, said he stays busy doing odd jobs like delivering gym equipment. He wants to go to college, but said he has trouble focusing while reading. They’ve lost a lot of people, he said.
Caldwell, 25, was fatally shot while behind the wheel of a car at a Hayward gas station in July 2011. Rafferty was shot and killed in January 2016 in Hayward. He was 30.
There hasn’t been an arrest in either killing.
Caldwell, the godfather of Grant’s daughter, left behind a daughter and son. He and Rafferty had carried Grant’s casket. The three friends are buried next to each other in the Lone Tree Cemetery in Hayward.
“I feel like if Oscar never died, I feel like some of my people would’ve never died,” Nigel Bryson said. “I feel like that kind of gave us no hope. I don’t think everything would’ve ended up the way it did.” Wanda Johnson, Grant’s mother, said Grant’s death changed the dynamic in the group of friends. She witnessed the men trying to soothe their suffering with alcohol.
“You could almost say they didn’t want to go on without each other,” Johnson said. “That is what I feel, that emotion of losing someone put them in such a deep hole that they couldn’t pull out of it.”
Bryson and Anicete travel the country together — Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas — to hang out in different cities. They went to Houston last week. Anicete longs to leave Hayward.
Maybe that’s the only way he’ll get closer to having peace.
“I want to move to somewhere it’s just quiet — no noise, no nothing. Just peaceful,” Anicete said. “Move to Hawaii or something. I feel like it’s peaceful. I ain’t got to worry about (having) to look over my shoulder or anything like that.”