Months after Ma'Khia Bryant's killing, Columbus police more emboldened than ever

[Jilly_in_VA]

On 20 April, millions held their breath as they waited for a judge to read the verdict that the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had been found guilty of the murder of George Floyd. About 20 minutes before the verdict, Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old foster child, was fatally shot by a police officer a few hundred miles away in Columbus, Ohio.

According to early reports, the altercation that prompted a call to police involved Bryant and two women in their early 20s, and had escalated outside the foster home of Angela Moore, where Ma’Khia and her younger sister, Ja’Niah, were placed. Body-cam footage would reveal that Bryant was clutching a knife, making her the only person visibly armed until Nicholas Reardon, a 23-year-old officer who only joined the force just a year and a half earlier, arrived at the scene and within seconds fired four shots in quick succession – all of which found their target, Bryant.

“She’s just a fucking kid, man!” exclaimed a man, later established as Ma’Khia’s biological father who had gathered with other bystanders including Jeanene Hammonds, the girls’ grandmother, in the driveway. Ma’Khia was taken to Mt Carmel East hospital in critical condition and pronounced dead soon after.

While Ma’Khia’s case received national attention, she’s actually one of several children who have died at the hands of police in Ohio’s capital city between 2016 and 2021 alone. In that period, five other juveniles have been killed in similar altercations with police use of deadly force: 13-year-old Tyre King in 2016; 16-year-olds Julius Ervin Tate Jr and Joseph Edward Haynes in 2018; and 15-year-old Abdirahman Salad and 17-year-old Joseph C Jewell III in 2020. Haynes, who was white, was the only non-Black victim. Data from the research collaborative Mapping Police Violence indicates that since 2013, among all police departments across the US, officers in Columbus have killed their city’s youth at a higher rate than most other police forces in the country.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/26/ma-khia-bryant-columbus-ohio-police
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Read the whole article for some background on Ma'Khia. It is tragic what this poor child endured. She was pushed to the breaking point, and that is quite aside from the police part of the story, but it tells you how things got to where they were.

[WHITT]

1. Leaping To Assumptions

According to early reports, the altercation that prompted a call to police involved Bryant and two women in their early 20s, and had escalated outside the foster home of Angela Moore, where Ma’Khia and her younger sister, Ja’Niah, were placed. Body-cam footage would reveal that Bryant was clutching a knife, making her the only person visibly armed until Nicholas Reardon, a 23-year-old officer who only joined the force just a year and a half earlier, arrived at the scene and within seconds fired four shots in quick succession – all of which found their target, Bryant.

It was Byrant, who BTW was an honor student, who placed the 911 call, asking for the police to come and help, as the other two women were threatening her, her grandmother, and others at the house with knives. The Columbus TV stations have played the audio of the call on-air, and put-up the transcript.

The former police chief refused to admit the caller was Bryant, as it blew-up his false narrative he created by releasing that 12 second video, then claiming Bryant was the attacker, thereby supposedly justifying the officer pumping four rounds into her seconds after arriving, even though she was being attacked and defending herself.

The key will be the recording of the dispatcher call. Generally speaking, dispatchers tend to regurgitate to officers what the 911 caller tells them. If the officer knew prior to arriving there were older adult women attacking people at the house with knives, the city of Columbus is gonna need to pull-out their Big Boy checkbook for a giant settlement.