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Tyre Nichols Cried in Anguish. Memphis Officers Kept Hitting. [1]
['Rick Rojas']
Date: 2023-01-27
MEMPHIS — The police officers kicked Tyre Nichols in the head, pepper-sprayed him and hit him repeatedly with a baton, even as he showed no signs of fighting back. At one point, after Mr. Nichols stood up, one officer struck him with at least five forceful blows while another held Mr. Nichols’s hands behind his back.
Soon, Mr. Nichols, 29, was on the ground — not far from the home he shared with his mother and stepfather — crying out in anguish: “Mom, Mom, Mom.”
Officials in Memphis released roughly an hour of video on Friday that captured how a traffic stop involving Mr. Nichols on Jan. 7 turned deadly during a second encounter after he fled on foot. The video, which was posted online in four segments just before 6 p.m., provided a degree of long-awaited clarity for the many people in Memphis and around the country who have demanded to know what happened. Yet it also failed to answer essential questions, including why the police pulled over Mr. Nichols, who was Black, to begin with.
The video was shared a day after five officers, all of them also Black, were charged with second-degree murder in connection with Mr. Nichols’s death. Soon after he died in a hospital three days after the beating, city officials promised to share the footage with the public as a measure of transparency in a case that has unsettled and angered much of the community and the nation.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/us/tyre-nichols-video-memphis.html
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