I don’t expect “free” hotel breakfasts to be good, but you couldn’t call the morning buffet at the Union Street Holiday Inn Express in Memphis bad. I was cutting an OK waffle into bite-size pieces with a flimsy plastic knife and fork when a young man from the front desk walked over and pasted a Post it Note next to my coffee cup. It said:
I looked up at him. He smiled.
“Claire wanted me to make sure you got this message.”
I’d forgotten.
“How nice of her.
How’d you know it was me?”
“She described you pretty well. I knew it had to be you.”
“Tell Claire thanks when you see her next.”
After breakfast, I google mapped House of Rhythm and Blues+Memphis
and headed to 2558 Warren, my first stop of the day. I arrived at a sad building on a dead-end
street in South Memphis. There were
weeds and no cars in the gravel parking lot.
I walked all around it. No
mural. Back to the Chevy.
Next, I added Steve A. Castle to my House of Rhythm and
Blues search. This time the address popped
up as 2536 Jackson Avenue. Not far
away. As I drove down Jackson I
saw the mural, with a large smiling Tyre Nichols, from half a block away.
As I was in the street taking pictures, a middle-aged man
came out of the building with a stack of Styrofoam clamshell containers and
walked to a pickup truck parked near me.
“You must be Steve Castle.”
He stopped and turned.
“That’s my business name.
I’m Steve Adams.”
“I just came from the House of Rhythm and Blues on Warren
Street.”
“That’s my old club.
I had to shut it down during the pandemic. I got this place about a year ago.”
“You delivering take-out food?”
“Yeah, my wife’s inside cooking. We added a Soul Food restaurant. We hope to start booking bands again come
summer. The pandemic was hard on the
music business.”
Steve put the clamshells in his truck and came to where I
was standing. We both looked at the
mural.
“I’m just passing through.
Woman at a hotel downtown told me about the mural. It’s beautiful.”
“The credit goes to David Yancy. He was the force behind it, I just supplied
the wall and the paint. He worked closely
with the family. We didn’t want to do
anything without their approval. They gave
us that picture of Tyre. David and the
Memphis black arts community took it from there. We had a nice crowd at the dedication. His Mom and Dad came for it. Good people.
I’m glad I could do it.”
“It says “Hello Parents” up there. What’s that mean?”
“That’s what Tyre always called out when he came in the house,
to let his parents know he was home.
They were close, the three of them.
Sometimes he came home from work on his lunch break to eat, check in
with them. Not a lot of twenty-something
kids would do that. They can’t believe
he’s gone. My heart goes out to them.”
“He worked at FedEx, right?”
“Yeah. FedEx is the
biggest employer in town. Something like 33,000 employees. Memphis is their world hub. FedEx is a huge part of the airport. 24-hour operation, three shifts.”
“What kind of kid was he?”
“Good kid.
Skateboarder. He was into
photography. If you Google him, you’ll see
links to his FaceBook page and his photography website. Crazy about sunsets. I didn’t know him before he got killed. Wish I had.”
I looked back at the mural.
“You a reporter or something?”
“Just a blogger.
Small group of readers.”
“You gonna write
about this?”
“I probably am, yeah.”
I fished a
DaveintheShack business card out of my wallet and handed it to him. He looked at it closely.
“I’m heading to where the cops stopped Tyre next. Do they think he was coming home from work
when he got stopped?’
“I don’t know what they think, 'cause they’re not talking but
he was stopped at like 8:30 at night close to home. Makes sense to me if he worked an
afternoon shift. But like I say, we
don’t know.”
“I appreciate you letting me interrupt your day.“
“No problem. Here,
have a takeout menu. I’ll write my email
on it. Maybe if you write about Tyre you
can send it to me?”
“Sure thing Steve.
Thanks again.”
Please meet the artist who created Tyre’s memorial mural by holding
your control key and clicking on this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0tTTtwhKG8
Tyre Nichols was stopped by Memphis police offers assigned to the MPD Scorpion Unit at 8:24 p.m. on January 7, 2023, at 6679 E. Raines Road near the intersection of Raines and Ross Roads. A reason for the stop was never articulated by the police or cannot be heard on video and audio from police body cams. Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis later stated that the department had reviewed camera footage and could not find any evidence of probable cause for the traffic stop.
A small memorial has been created there, in front of Prospect
Christian Methodist Evangelical, a large 154-year-old Memphis church led by
Rev. Dr. Robert H. Washington, Sr.. Across the street from the CME church is Kirby
Middle School. 338 sixth through eighth
graders attend Kirby, a newly established charter school.
Tyre was driving east on Raines. There’s little doubt that he was about to turn
south onto Ross Road. 800 yards south down
Ross Road is the main entrance into Brandywine subdivision where Tyre lived
with his parents. A left turn through that
entrance takes you onto the curved streets and cul-de-sacs lined with Brandywine’s
tidy brick bungalows.
Tyre’s vehicle never made it past the church. Body-worn camera footage shows an officer pulling
Nichols out of the car as Nichols says “I didn’t do anything.” An officer shouts “get on the fucking ground”. Tyre complied. Moments later another officer shouted “I’m
going to tase your ass.” Tyre was tased
in the leg. Officers simultaneously
yelled numerous commands. While Nichols was
on the ground an officer continued to yell for Nichols to lay down. Nicols responded “I am on the ground.” Pepper spray was deployed against Nichols
which hit several of the other officers as well. At that point, Tyre broke free from the
police, ran down Ross Road, and cut left through the gates of his subdivision. He nearly made it home.
Tyre was caught in a foot chase and wrestled to the ground inside Brandywine subdivision at the corner of Castlegate Lane and Bear Creek Lane. Brandywine subdivision is in the Hickory Hills neighborhood in South Memphis. A brick home near where Tyre lived was listed online with an asking price of $247,000 at the time this blog post was written.
A sign not far from the second memorial
reminded Brandywine residents that HOA (Homeowner’s Association) fees were due
quarterly. A swimming pool and a tennis
court, part of the perks that their HOA fees make possible, were directly
across the street from where Tyre was beaten so brutally the second time.
Video of Tyre’s apprehension and beatings were all taken in
the dark. I watched the video many times, trying to make out the
surroundings, and the context, and listened closely to the audio. I was there in broad daylight. A second memorial stands where Tyre’s final dash
to make it home ended. I could see it
all clearly. I could imagine it
happening.
Of most interest to me was determining the location of Tyre’s
house. During his beating, Tyre can be
heard shouting out for his mother three times.
Information supplied by the police at a news conference described Tyre’s
home, where he lived with his parents as being “within a hundred yards.” No address was released that I could find.
The thought that you could suffer a life-ending beating so
close to home is what brought me to Memphis.
That Tyre called out for his mom made me think he was close enough to
think she might actually hear him and come to his rescue. I understand that. Children count on moms throughout their lives. I wanted to see just how close Tyre was to
safety.
George Floyd called out to his mother as he was dying on the
street in Minneapolis, his neck under the knee of policeman Derek Chauvin. George Floyd’s mother had died two years
before his fatal interaction with the police.
He may have imagined joining her.
There is a boy inside every grown man.
All of us are at times desperate for help, crying out to the person in
life we count on most. But that night Tyre Nichol’s cries, like
George Floyd’s, did not save him.
As I stood there on the street, at age 71, I thought of my
own mom, big and forceful. I could
picture her running down that street seeing her son in terrible
trouble. In my mind, she screamed at the
cops, threw herself on top of me, put up her own arms to stop their blows and keep
me alive.
But it was, after all, January 7th. Memphis was deep into winter. The sunset,
Tyre’s last, happened at 5:05 p.m.. The
air temperature was 50 degrees. Not cold
for Memphis in January but cold enough to keep the windows closed. If anyone in the neighborhood heard the
commotion, there is no evidence they came out of their houses.
The cops caught up to Tyre on foot at 8:33 p.m.. He was taken to the ground once again, pepper
sprayed a second time, kicked in the upper torso numerous times. More cops arrived quickly. On the videotape, an officer can be heard
yelling “I’m going to beat the fuck out of you” before striking Tyre several
times with a baton. One officer punched
Tyre five times in the face even though officers had control of his arms.
Tyre’s conduct has been described as non-resisting and nonviolent. There is no indication he struck back at the
officers. The accumulation of blows Tyre
absorbed both there and in front of the church most likely led to his death. An autopsy has not been released.
I tried to imagine it all as I stood near the spot where it
happened. As I did, a car drove by
slowly, parked on the driveway nearest the memorial shrine, and honked. The car was driven by a middle-aged African
American woman. A much older silver-haired
African American lady came out of the house walking with a cane. She walked slowly to the car and stood by the
driver’s side door. The driver,
presumably a relative, rolled down the window.
“Honey, go in the house please and get my sweater. I didn’t know it was this cold.”
The driver went up to the house and open the door with her
own key as the gray-haired lady walked to the passenger side door. That’s when she saw me.
“Three doors up,” she said.
“What’s that ma’am?”
“Three doors up on the right-hand side. That’s where his parents live. When people like you stop, that’s what I tell
them. Three doors up.”
She pointed past the memorial on the street where I stood,
making an arc with her hand and arm. I looked
in that direction. Castlegate Lane made
a gentle turn to the right, a bit uphill.
I saw the first house plainly and
counted two more rooftops. It wasn’t a
hundred yards. It was barely fifty.
“Oh my God.”
“Yes sir. That
close. I don’t know the parents. They’re fairly new here and I don’t get out the
house like I used to. But I hear they’re
wonderful people. I can’t imagine
they’ll stay. Nobody deserves that.”
The younger woman came out of the house with a sweater over
her arm and both got in the car. I was
still standing there, stunned, looking towards Tyre’s house when they pulled
out of the drive and drove away.
I lost all desire to discover more about the senseless death
that occurred that January night in America,
this time in Memphis. Not from a
gun this time but a brutal beating. Not a black life snuffed out at the hands of white aggressors this time but black-on-black crime. Cops let their unchecked anger play out
violently for reasons I cannot fathom.
It’s beyond reason.
Someone else might have walked up to the Nichols house and
described it for his readers. A true
journalist would have knocked on the door, given whoever answered his card, and
asked if he could speak to them. Not
me. Not that day or any other.
We can picture Tyre’s ordeal because of the video and the
police reports. But we will never see
videotape of the Nichols family’s grief.
There will never be a detailed account of the loss that will haunt his
mother and father for the rest of their lives.
Their son was murdered by the police on the street corner nearest their
house, closer than the corner where my kids waited at the bus stop when they
went to grade school. Can you imagine any justification for that? Is there any rational
reason why Tyre Nichols is dead?
If there is an answer, it’s this. Americans, you, me, the Nichols family, all
of us, live in a terribly violent country. Yet we do nothing about it. Not only do we fail as a nation to confront violence
and change our violent behaviors, we don’t even admit to them. Is this the kind of country you want to live
in?
No comments:
Post a Comment