“They reduced him to mush”. Dyer Nichols’ mother has taken America by storm with her excruciating pain, describing her son’s death by Memphis police officers as “beaten to death.”
• Read more: US braces for fatal African-American arrest video
• Read more: Five police officers have been charged with murder after brutally arresting an African-American man
Behind a loud megaphone, RowVaughn Wells warned the people of this large town in the southern US state of Tennessee on Thursday evening that the footage of the upcoming drama would be “terrifying”.
She did not look like her husband. But when she went to the hospital hours after the beating, she saw with her own eyes what had happened to her son.
“He had bruises all over, his head was swollen like a watermelon, his neck was so swollen there was an open sore,” he recounted in a poignant interview broadcast by CNN on Friday. “When I saw it, I understood that he was dead.”
“They reduced him to a pulp.”
Credit: Family of Dyer Nichols
“Where has their humanity gone? They hit my son like a piñata,” she continued, referring to the decorated object for children to collect candy and toys at birthday parties, a tradition imported from Mexico.
Dyer Nichols, a 29-year-old African-American man, was hospitalized on January 7 after a “confrontation” with police who wanted to arrest him for a simple traffic violation. He died three days later.
On Thursday, five agents, themselves African-American, were charged with murder and jailed. 4 of them were later released on bail.
The circumstances of the tragedy are not yet known, but RowVaughn Wells has repeated for days that his “son was fine.”
“He loved skateboarding”, “went out every evening to watch the sunset and take pictures”, and “had my name tattooed on his arm”, he pointed out during a press conference earlier in the week.
“Does this sound like someone who doesn’t respect the police?”
Admitting that she still didn’t understand everything, she said between two sobs: “I know my son Dyer is no longer with me”.
Despite her grief, she hopes that her city, or any other city, will not go up in flames. “When the video comes out, it will be terrible, but I want you to protest peacefully,” he told a gathering to pay tribute to his son on Thursday evening.
“I don’t want you to burn the cities and lay waste the streets because my son doesn’t want that,” he insisted, “…we have to live there.
According to officials, the grieving mother promised CNN she would feel “pity.” “They bring shame to their family, to the African-American community,” he said.
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