Why Did the Police Shoot Matthew Zadok Williams?

[Nevilledog]

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Michael Luo
@michaelluo
Detailed investigation by ⁦@charlesbethea⁩ on the death of Matthew Zadok Williams, who was killed inside his home by DeKalb County police. Williams appears to have died from a slow hemorrhage after officers failed to render aid for nearly 2 hours.

Why Did the Police Shoot Matthew Zadok Williams?
Outside Atlanta, a mother and five sisters look for answers.
newyorker.com
5:24 AM · Jul 6, 2021

https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/why-did-the-police-shoot-matthew-zadok-williams

On the afternoon of April 13th, around two o’clock, Hahnah Williams, a lawyer in Atlanta, received a call from her twelve-year-old niece, who told her to come to her mother’s house right away. Hahnah could hear her mom, Chris Ann Lewis, crying in the background. The phone rang again a few minutes later, as Hahnah was putting on her shoes; it was an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He said that Hahnah’s younger brother, Matthew Zadok Williams, a self-taught investor in his thirties who lived alone and went by his middle name, had died the day before in “an officer-involved shooting.” “I thought, How?” Hahnah recalled later. “He doesn’t leave the house!” Zadok preferred solitude and rarely went anywhere. When she arrived at her mother’s house, the agent was there. Hahnah asked him where the shooting happened, and he gave her the address. “He lives there!” she exclaimed. “Did they just come and hunt him?” she recalls thinking.

The DeKalb County Police Department had issued a statement about the shooting that morning, though it did not mention Zadok by name. The statement reported that a man “aggressively wielding a knife” had “lunged at officers with the knife causing one of them to discharge their firearm” and then had “fled into a vacant residence.” He had, according to the statement, come back out and lunged at officers with the knife, again “causing an officer to discharge his firearm,” and then gone “back into the residence.”

Hahnah did not stay long at her mother’s place. She and her mom got in the car and headed to Zadok’s house, a townhome-style duplex in a wooded subdivision near a highway, about fifteen minutes from Chris Ann’s house. On the way, Hahnah got another call, from an investigator with the DeKalb County medical examiner’s office. She put him on speakerphone, and he summarized the version of events he’d been given. The officers were responding to a 911 call, he told them. At one point, he said that “there wasn’t anything spectacular that happened” to Zadok.

“Sir, wait a minute, don’t be disrespectful,” Hahnah said. “Something spectacular did happen. My brother got killed.” She added, “He owns that apartment. He was in his own home when they killed him.”

*snip*

[Hoyt]

1. Wish police had arrived with mental health people, had used a taser, etc. But

he was outside with a knife, not inside like the family keeps saying. He ran toward police.

The videos show Black police begging him to drop the knife, one was crying or near crying. With that said, they still could have restrained him it appears to me, although going through that doorway would have been risky and I’m not sure police knew that was his house.

I want these things handled better. There are ways to do that. But I don’t think this family is going to get far, other than empathy, when the videos contradict what they are saying.