The Death of Tyre Nichols (2023)

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From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, what really happened to Tyre Nichols, who died after he was violently beaten by police in Memphis? An encounter captured in a series of videos released over the weekend. My colleague, Southern Bureau Chief Rick Rojas, is in Memphis, where he’s been piecing together the story.

It’s Monday, January 30th.

Rick, tell us about Tyre Nichols, the man at the center of this story.

So Tyre Nichols was a 29-year-old man who lived in Memphis. He was Black, and his mother described him as living a kind of simple, pleasant life. Every day, like clockwork, he would wake up at 8:30, and he would go to the same Starbucks and get the same drink. He had been working for about nine months at a FedEx facility in this city. And he seemed to be doing well on all accounts.

He loved to skateboard, and he was a regular at Shelby Farms, which is this really sprawling park just outside Memphis. He’d go almost every day, either for skating or to photograph the sunset. He was an amateur photographer. And he had a four-year-old son. And he just seemed like someone who was like a typical 29-year-old who was finding his way and building a life for himself.

And so I think for his family, that’s what has made this all the more staggering. They didn’t see him as someone who would have any kind of encounter with the police.

Right. Well, I want to talk about that encounter. We, of course, now have a video of it. But for several weeks, we didn’t. And there was a fair bit of mystery around what exactly had happened. So I’m wondering, Rick, if you could take us back to what first happened to Tyre Nichols and walk us through how this all unfolded as we experienced it in real time.

Yeah. This case has been shrouded in a lot of mystery before the video came out. At the beginning, what we know came from a police statement.

So on January 7th, Tyre Nichols gets pulled over by the police in the southeastern corner of the city. It was around 8:30 PM. And it was on suspicion of reckless driving.

OK.

And at that point, there was some sort of physical confrontation between Tyre Nichols and those officers. He then took off on foot. The officers caught up with them, and then there was a second confrontation. And somewhere during the course of those confrontations, he sustained the level of injury that was so severe that he needed to be hospitalized. He was unconscious for three days, and then he died on January 10th.

So in the immediate aftermath, all we know is that a pretty routine-sounding traffic stop has ended in Tyre Nichols’ death. And so of course, the question becomes, did these officers use excessive force? So what happens in the next few days?

So multiple investigations are launched. First, there’s an internal inquiry by the Memphis Police Department. And then the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was called in to look at the basics of the case to try to understand whether or not the officers had used excessive force and whether that use of force reached a criminal level. And then after that, federal prosecutors also said that they would be launching a civil rights investigation into what happened as well.

Got it. So everyone in law enforcement is taking this pretty seriously.

Yes. And in a way to acknowledge that, city officials announced pretty early on that they wanted to be transparent, and they plan to release whatever video footage they collected as part of their investigation to show the public what happened during that traffic stop.

s then on January 20th, 10 days after Tyre Nichols died, the city announced that the internal investigation by the Memphis Police Department had been wrapped up, and they fired five police officers who had been at the scene that night. They said that they had used excessive force. They said that they had failed in their duty to intervene and failed in their duty to render aid.

And in this moment, Rick, when these five officers are fired, what do we learn about them?

So we learned a few things. We learned that they’re all Black. We learned that they’re all in their 20s to early 30s. So they’re all relatively new to the force, having spent only a few years in the Department. They all joined between 2017 and 2020. And then we also learned that they’re part of a specialized group of officers called the Scorpion Unit. And it’s a group that patrols high crime areas of the city where there’s been persistent struggles with violence.

And it was created in 2021 at a time when the murder rate was climbing, when anxiety over public safety was escalating. And this was kind of cast as a way to directly combat that, by putting these officers out into the streets in these neighborhoods.

So at this point, what we know is that these five officers are part of an elite unit that seems kind of specially empowered to crack down on crime in Memphis. And very notably, what we know is that all five of them are Black and are accused of ending the life of a Black man.

Yes. And at this point, the family launched this effort to really push for as they see it getting justice for Tyre. And the first part of that is just seeing this video, trying to understand how this traffic stop went from what seemed like a routine traffic stop and became something so much worse. And so finally, last Monday, Tyre Nichols’ family and their lawyers, they had the chance to finally see the footage for themselves.

And afterwards, they had a press conference. And that’s where we were able to hear some of the first descriptions of what the cameras were able to capture.

The family’s attorney, Ben Crump, who is a very prominent civil rights lawyer, who represented the family of George Floyd, just talked about how troubling the footage was.

And then one of the family’s other lawyers described Tyre Nichols.

And throughout all of this, you could just hear his mother crying in the background.

She couldn’t make it through the first minute of the video because of just how painful it was to witness that happening to her son.

So at this point, Memphis is learning about this video through the filter of a horrified family.

Yes. And then last Thursday, just a few days after the family was able to see the video, local prosecutors announced that the five officers had been charged with second degree murder.

Wow.

Among other felonies. And with this announcement, we just hear this outpouring of condemnation.

From the district attorney.

From the Memphis Police chief.

From the head of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations.

And we hear from them that this was a violation of human rights, and it was a crime.

And yet, with all of these descriptions, we still don’t know exactly what happened. We don’t know, why was Tyre Nichols stopped in the first place? How did he react when the officers stopped him? Why did he flee on foot? And what did the officers do to Tyre? I mean, we hear that there’s been excessive use of force, but what does that actually mean? And then we don’t know how long it takes for medical personnel to treat him, and we don’t know how long it takes before he is taken to a hospital. There’s just so many questions that are still unanswered at this point.

Right. Because so far, what’s on this video is only really being filtered through, first, the family, now these city officials, all of whom are saying that they’re horrified. But the public has yet to see any of the video itself.

Exactly. And so on the same day that the charges are announced against the officers, the city says that the video will finally be released to the public sometime on Friday evening.

And so not only are these officials coming out and saying that they’re horrified by the content of the video. They also really express deep concern about the kind of reaction it will provoke in the city.

The police chief, various elected officials, activists, even Mr. Nichols’ own mother comes out and just implores the community to not let the anger or outrage that they really worry about them having after seeing this, they don’t want that to turn into something destructive.

So the sense of anticipation and really, the sense of anxiety are really building in Memphis now. After-school activities have been closed across the city. Extra law enforcement from around the state has been summoned to Memphis to be on standby. So they’re prepared to see what happens when people in this city finally have the chance to see this for themselves.

And on Friday night, as promised, the video was released.

We’ll be right back.

So Rick, walk us through what we see once this video footage is finally released on Friday night.

So it ends up actually being four separate videos that are all posted online, and it adds up to roughly an hour of footage. It’s a combination of footage from body cameras, as well as stationary footage from police cameras that are posted around the neighborhood. And so there’s just a feed from one of those cameras. And it starts in the middle of Tyre Nichols being pulled over. So we never actually see the beginning of the stop.

God. It’s so while the police have been saying that this was a case of reckless driving, we don’t actually see that or hear the police telling Tyre Nichols that they’re pulling him over for that?

Right. Exactly. So the whole reason this all unfolded, like we still don’t the answer to that question. And so the body camera is on. And suddenly, the audio kicks in.

And we just see his car in the middle of an intersection at a traffic light. And we can see the officers. They’re running towards his car. Their guns are drawn. They’re cursing at them they’re telling him to get out and get on the ground.

And at one point, he’s just lying on the ground, pleading. Like I’m just trying to go home. An officer tries to pepper spray him. And at that point, he runs.

The officer tried to tase him, but he gets away. And so about 8 minutes later,

The officers catch up to him in a residential area. And he’s tackled to the ground.

The officers pepper spray him. They hit and kick him. You can see him being kicked in the head.

And you can see him being hit with batons. Part of the reason that we’re able to see this is not just because it’s the up close kind of shaky body camera footage. We actually have this bird’s eye view from the street camera that just is able to capture everything as it’s happening from above.

Right.

At one point, they stand him up. And an officer punches him repeatedly. The beating lasts about 3 minutes. And throughout it, you can just hear his cries of anguish. At one point, you can hear him crying out for his mom. He says mom, mom, mom. And her home is maybe 100 yards away.

Right. It’s very difficult footage to watch.

It is. It’s a lot to take in. Eventually, the officers prop him up against the police car. He slumps over.

And you can hear officers saying that he reached for one of their guns, or he tried to take a swing at them. But those are things that we actually don’t see in the video. I mean, other than him running after the stop, like we don’t really see any resistance. There’s really no evidence that we can see from the videos of him fighting back.

So the officers appear at a couple of different moments here to be trying to justify their actions, even though the footage doesn’t really support the actions.

Right. And then a couple of minutes later, you have emergency responders arrive at the scene. There are two medics from the Fire Department. They look at Nichols, but you can see they’re not administering any care.

Right. I remember watching it and kind of counting the number of people on the scene. It’s upwards of 10. None of whom appear to be doing anything to attend to Tyre Nichols.

Right. He’s just sitting by that car for more than 24 minutes before an ambulance arrives. And occasionally, Nichols slumps over by the car, and they prop him up.

So thinking back to those questions, Rick, that we all had before the footage was released, it does seem like a lot of them were answered in these videos because we see these officers really aggressively approach Tyre Nichols’ vehicle, pull him to the ground. He runs. We don’t know why, but he does not fight back at any point, as you said.

We hear the officers at one point expressing an intent to hurt him. We then clearly see that they’re using a tremendous amount of force against this person who’s not fighting back. And we later hear the officers offering a justification or a set of justifications for their actions after the fact in ways that don’t really line up with what we see in the videos.

And finally, we see the police and these medics showing very little regard for Tyre Nichols’ injuries or his well-being despite the fact that he’s visibly and audibly in pain.

Right. Exactly. And that’s why so many of the people I’ve talked to said that they found the video as disturbing and as infuriating as the family made it out to be. And not just the brutality on display and the beating, but also what they saw is the callousness in the waiting around that came after.

So I want to turn to how people in Memphis have reacted to this footage, given all the anxiety that was expressed by both city officials and Tyre Nichols’ family over what the reaction would look like.

There was pain. There his anger. Many people in Memphis watched the footage, but there were also others that didn’t, that couldn’t. They felt that whatever they would learn wouldn’t be outweighed by the trauma they’d inflict by seeing something like this. And there were protests in Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC. And in Memphis too. You had dozens come out on Friday night. They blocked off an interstate, and they closed off a bridge. But things wrapped up peacefully before too long. And it was sort of the same on Saturday, where it was a modest showing, but there were people that came out and demanded justice.

Is there a sense that the way the city of Memphis has handled this case so far and what looks to be a real determination to get the wheels of justice in motion so quickly, that that may help explain why the reaction has been what it’s been, which is to say peaceful and to a degree, a little understated.

I think so. I mean, Ben Crump, the lawyer for the family, said at a press conference before the tape came out on Friday that this should the blueprint America, is what he said. He talked about how swiftly officials moved here to fire the officers, how swiftly they moved to bring criminal charges all in less than a month.

Right. I’m curious. As we think about how people are reacting to this all, how folks are thinking about what has been really a central element of what happened to Tyree Nichols. And something that’s different about this case from a lot of the cases of alleged police brutality that we have focused on in this country, which is that he is a Black man who was allegedly killed by five Black police officers.

And as painfully familiar as we have become with Black men dying at the hands of the police, typically, in these cases that get a lot of attention, it’s been at the hands of White police officers. So we’re a little less prepared for all the officers to be Black. So how are people thinking about that, and how are they making sense of it?

It’s very complicated. One of the prevailing sentiments that I hear in Memphis is just this sense of sadness over all of this. One of my colleagues spoke to a woman who just she saw the photos of the officers on TV, and she was just disappointed. How could you do this, she asked. Memphis, it’s a majority Black city, and it has a majority Black police force. And the idea has been that if you have a police force whose demographics match those of the city, that it can make a difference. That it could make policing more effective. That it could really reduce the tensions that endure between the community and law enforcement.

Right. And potentially prevent things like this from happening, what happened in this case.

Right. Right. And so this was an instance where that mode of thinking didn’t really bear out. And so what I hear from many of the people that you talk to here is that yes, there is a lot of anger and frustration directed at these five officers. But they see this as an indictment of a system and of a culture that surrounds policing, so that the race of the officers doesn’t actually make that much of a difference, that the divisions between the police and the community just still remain the same.

Right. The question I think a lot of people are asking in the wake of what happened to Tyre Nichols is whether there’s something about policing, something fundamental that occurs when officers put on that uniform given the nature of modern policing, that somehow encourages brutality, especially toward Black people, but not just toward them, and regardless of the race of the officers.

Exactly. And that’s really what has made this so much more complicated.

So Rick, what happens now in Memphis? What do we expect the next few weeks to look like in this case?

The mayor, the police chief have all committed to really digging in and examining how do you prevent something like this from happening and how do you build something better. And one of the first steps of that was on Saturday, the police chief said that she had disbanded the Scorpion Unit, the specialized group of which these five officers had been a part of.

And so there’s still the investigations about what actually happened at the scene. Those two medics who responded to the call and were seen not doing very much in the video, they were relieved of duty by the Fire Department, and there’s an investigation about whether they should be fired or face other consequences. Tyre Nichols’ family believes that they should be criminally charged.

Two sheriff deputies have also been relieved of duty as the Sheriff’s Department here tries to figure out what they were doing at the scene. There is a separate federal civil rights investigation that’s happening. And then there’s the case against the five officers who are charged with second degree murder. The prosecution is moving forward with them, and it could very well head to trial.

Rick, have the five officers or lawyers for them said anything in their defense?

Well, the main thing is they’ve just pleaded with the public to avoid a rush to judgment. And they’ve made the case that the video does not tell you everything, and that the public should not base their opinions entirely upon what they see in that video. Just as we don’t know what initiated the stop, there may be other factors potentially, is what these lawyers are saying, that just aren’t reflected in the footage that we saw.

Right. It strikes me that Memphis is about to go through what many cities in the US like Minneapolis, and Ferguson, and Baltimore have gone through after a case like this, which is, first, a trauma, right? A kind of collective trauma around an alleged case of police brutality that ends in the death of a Black man. And then a trial that very painfully relives it all.

Right. It’s going to be a long road. So when I talk to people in the community, there is this sense of skepticism that still really lingers because yes, there have been charges. There have been firings. There have been changes in police department policy. As Crump was saying, that there is this blueprint now. There is a blueprint, but it’s like the house isn’t built.

That’s the feeling. It’s that what happens with the trial? What happens ultimately with the Police Department? And what I hear, especially from people that are really invested in this case, they know that it’s going to take vigilance because it really is a long road ahead to get to the place where they want the city to be. And that’s with a better Police Department and with these officers being held accountable.

Well, Rick, thank you very much.

Thank you.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Sunday, violence erupted in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israeli settlers carried out dozens of attacks against Palestinians and their property. It was the latest in a series of deadly clashes that began last Thursday when the Israeli military staged a raid in which 10 people were killed.

Israel said that the raid was a counterterrorism operation aimed at Islamic jihadists planning attacks against Israeli targets. The next day, a Palestinian gunmen killed seven people outside a synagogue in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. Overall, at least 20 people have died over the past four days.

Today’s episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Mooj Zadie and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Anita Badejo with help from John Ketchum, Lisa Chow, and Paige Cowett. Contains original music by Marion Lozano and Elisheba Ittoop and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.