- The Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis says she is shocked by the events that led to Tyre Nichols’ death.
- Five officers were fired earlier this week, and then charged with second-degree murder.
- Footage of Mr Nichols’ fatal encounter with police was released on Friday.
One thing went horribly wrong that night, according to everyone who has watched the video of Tyre Nichols’ tragic collision with five Memphis police officers.
His family’s attorneys claimed the police beat him “like a human pinata” and behaved like a “gang of wolves.”
Cerelyn Davis, the first black woman to hold the position of police chief, expressed disbelief to the media. She said, “Something happened that we can’t understand.”
The five policemen were fired earlier this week as a result of the footage, and they were later charged with crimes including second-degree murder.
The videos were made accessible to the general public on Friday night. The graphic circumstances that led to Mr. Nichols’ death were depicted in the video,
Why did police pull him over?
One important detail—how did all this start—is absent from the four recordings, which total more than an hour of evidence and feature different viewpoints captured by police body cameras and a pole-mounted surveillance camera.
According to his relatives, Mr. Nichols, an enthusiastic photographer, was out driving in order to capture the sunset on camera.
Police said on Friday that there is no evidence to support the accusation that Mr. Nichols was stopped for allegedly driving recklessly, contrary to what officers initially claimed.
The police claim that the initial traffic stop was not captured, although we are not of why. The footage that has been made public only starts after officers confront him at a crossroads at 8:24 p.m. local time.
Officers with weapons drawn immediately take him out of the vehicle and hurl him to the ground.
“I did nothing,” you say. Early on, Mr. Nichols declares, and he follows the authorities’ directions.
Put your hands behind your back before I break your [expletive]! an officer yells.
The officers are working quite hard right now, Mr. Nichols tells them. “I just want to get home,” you say.
In a later moment of the video, an officer claims that Mr. Nichols swerved and nearly struck his police vehicle, but there is no visual proof of this.
Another policeman says he believes Mr. Nichols might be “on something,” implying that they thought he might have been taking narcotics. There is no evidence to suggest that this was the case, and police said they did not discover anything in his car later in the video.
Why were the officers so aggressive?
The officers are aggressive right away, shouting at Mr. Nichols and warning him to lie down or they will tase him.
In the recordings, Mr. Nichols initially complies with the officers’ rudeness despite being perplexed. As they try to handcuff him, he does as commanded and lies down on the ground.
He manages to escape when one of them tries to taze him, and the police then pepper spray him as he tries to flee.
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It’s unclear how he got away and why the police were acting so forcefully in the first place.
“I couldn’t understand it from start to finish,” Professor Greg Donaldson from John Jay College of Criminal Justice
From the traffic stop, the officers’ anxiety when they pulled the car over, to the pursuit, to the officers’ lack of training and lack of a plan for restraining and subduing the person they had stopped.
Why did they continue to assault him?
According to Mr. Donaldson, the footage appears to demonstrate that police rage increases “as their incompetence looks to be more exposed.”
One of the officers squirts water in his eyes after himself feeling the affects of the pepper spray and suggests they should “stomp” him when they capture him.
The films that were taken during the second encounter, which started at 8:32 p.m., show them doing just that. Police repeatedly kicked and struck Mr. Nichols in the head and body for several minutes as he sobbed for his mother. One of the officers is seen breathing heavily and pacing off. He returns to the scene a little while later, grabs his extendable baton, and repeatedly strikes Mr. Nichols.
None of the officers make an effort to stop him or the other person who is seen punching Mr. Nichols at least five times in the head.
The event “simply got out of hand,” according to Mr. Donaldson.
Why did no one help him?
The video makes it clear that Mr. Nichols is in pain as a result of the beating. He writhes on the ground before slumping up against a car because he is unable to sit up straight.
The lack of humanity that followed the tragedy, according to Mr. Donaldson, was the worst aspect of it.
He claims that Mr. Nichols was left “lying there on the ground like a piece of junk” by the officers, who “stood around like it was just an afternoon on the street.”
There are more police there than were captured on the bodycams that were made public, and we are not aware of any further video.
At 8:41 p.m., doctors show in to evaluate Mr. Nichols. Twenty minutes later, a stretcher and then an ambulance can be seen in the footage. How long it will be before Mr. Nichols is taken to the hospital is unknown.
What is the cause of his death?
Even while it is obvious Mr. Nichols was badly battered, the exact reason for his death three days later in the hospital is still unknown.
There is blood surrounding his face in the footage, and we do witness officers boot him twice in the head.
However, the whole report has not been made public, according to attorneys for his family, an independent autopsy concluded that he had “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating.”
Bernd Debusmann, Barbara Plett Usher, and Nada Tawfik contributed additional reporting.
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