As thousands rallied for voting rights at the annual March on Washington last weekend, 500 members of families from across the country gathered near the Washington Monument to tell the stories of their loved ones killed by police. The relatives joined the second annual Impacted Families march, organized in part by Mass Action Against Police Brutality, a Boston-based activist group.
The fight to have those fatal police shooting cases reopened has spanned months and years for some families, and decades or even lifetimes for others.
Wayne Dozier traveled to D.C. along with members of at least seven families from the Boston area for a rally Saturday. Dozier’s grandson Danroy “DJ” Henry was shot by police in 2010. After more than a decade of pushing for the case to be reexamined, the Easton, Mass. family is monitoring a new review of the case underway in Westchester County, N.Y.
“Things are changing very slowly,” Dozier told GBH News. “It's like a huge ship on the ocean, you just can't spin it around. But we don't give up because we know that it's right to keep fighting. We know that what happened to Danny was murder and it was wrong.”
Henry, a 20-year-old student at Pace University, played a home football game against Stonehill College in October 2010. After the game, Henry’s parents took him out to dinner before heading back to Easton. Henry went out to a bar near campus, where a fight broke out between two men not in Henry’s friend group. As the crowd dispersed, Henry began to drive away. Mount Pleasant police officer Ronald Gagnon said he tried to get Henry’s attention using an air horn. Henry’s friend Desmond Hinds, who was in the vehicle, said he thought the officer was telling Henry to exit the fire lane.
Pleasantville police officer Aaron Hess then stepped in front of Henry’s vehicle. From the hood of Henry’s car, Hess fired four gunshots into the windshield. After being shot, Henry was handcuffed and placed facedown on the ground, not given immediate medical treatment. As Hess was treated for a knee injury, Henry was placed in an ambulance and pronounced dead at the scene.
“You see the same story here, from two, three months ago,” Dozier said, gesturing to another family giving testimony on the stage. “It’s the same scenario, and the worst part about it is there's no repercussions for those that are involved.”
Last May, former Minneapolis police officer Derick Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd during an arrest the year before.
“George Floyd’s verdict blew things out of the water,” Latoyia Howell, whose son Justus was fatally shot in the back by Illinois police in 2015, told the crowd. “But at the end of the day, he’s still dead, like our loved ones.”
For six years, Howell has been asking prosecutors to reopen the case involving her 17-year-old son.
“It's crazy how we can sit up on the stage and tell our stories, and it feels like we're the only ones listening,” Howell said. “We don't see no politicians out here, no elected officials, no police. People ask me, why are you still marching? Why are you still going to these events after six years? There is still no justice, we lost everything. But I want everybody to know that we don't have to stand alone.”
Chauvin's guilty verdict is still an exception to the norm, according to data from Bowling Green State University.
About 1,000 fatal police shootings are reported each year in the U.S., but less than two percent of officers are arrested for murder or manslaughter.
When the cases close and the officers are freed from charges, many families begin a long journey to fight back.
Carla Sheffield, 56, of Mattapan, lost her son, 26-year-old Burrell Ramsey White, in a police shooting following a chase in Boston’s South End in 2012. The following year, then-Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley cleared the officer, Mathew Pieroway, of any wrongdoing.
“It took me three months to just get my head up off the pillow to begin to fight,” she told GBH News. “I won’t stop. I will continue to fight until I get justice for my son.”
Sheffield says cases in Boston have not been treated with the respect they deserve.
“Boston has not admitted that they did anything wrong,” she said. “You can't fix what you don't admit.”
Sheffield says Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, who was elected after Conley retired, has offered to meet with her. But it’s been over a year with no meeting.
“What angers me about her is that she and I both stood on the platform together down at Copley Square and spoke,” Sheffield said. “She's like, we're going to get together. We're going to talk about your case. And that hasn't happened.”
Hope Coleman's son Terrence Coleman, a Black man with paranoid schizophrenia, was shot and killed by Boston police in 2016. Coleman, 65, says she's frustrated by the lack of action from Rollins and other local authorities.
“She needs to get her act together,” Coleman told GBH News. “All these officials running around talking like they got something to say. Nothing comes out but a bunch of bull crap.”
Rollins said in a statement to GBH News Monday that she has “made a commitment to thoroughly and compassionately review allegations of excessive force as well as discharges and incidents resulting in death during or from encounters with law enforcement." She has created a team made up of community members, law enforcement officials, criminal defense attorneys and other experts.
Rollins did not specify a schedule or timeline for future meetings with families.
“Every one of these deaths is a tragedy and causes ongoing trauma and immeasurable pain for loved ones and family members left behind,” Rollins said. “I meet with these families because they deserve to be heard, and are entitled to answers regarding their loved one’s death. I believe those answers should come directly from the top, which is why I meet with them personally.”
Next month, Rahimah Rahim, whose son Usaama was shot and killed in Roslindale by Boston police and the FBI in 2015, is scheduled to meet with Rollins.
Rahim, 75, says she has spent the past six years trying to get the case reopened.
“We just keep hoping because, I mean, the Constitution is a good piece of paper, if it's followed,” Rahim told GBH News. “We have good laws, if the laws are followed. We just have to enforce them.”
Though Black Americans account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, they are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Latinos are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate, nearly twice that of white Americans.
Over the past six years, Massachusetts had the second-lowest number of fatal police shootings per capita in the country.
Of those fatal shootings, Black and Hispanic people were disproportionately affected: roughly a quarter of the victims were Black people, who represent nine percent of the state's population, and 20% were Hispanic, making up 11% of the state. People with apparent mental illness died at a rate well above the national average: more than one in five people fatally shot have mental illnesses, according to a Washington Post database.
“It's a problem that we have police officers going out to interface with people who are severely mentally ill,” Jennifer Root Bannon, 45, told GBH News. Bannon’s brother, 41-year-old Juston Root, was shot and killed by Boston Police in February 2020.
Authorities say Root, a Mattapan resident who had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, held a plastic paintball gun outside a mental health facility at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Following a police chase, Root was shot more than 31 times in a parking area along Route 9. The family said Root was not brandishing a weapon at the time he was shot.
One month after the shooting, Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey cleared the five involved Boston police officers and one Massachusetts State Police trooper of wrongdoing in a final report. The findings of a separate investigation by the Suffolk County district attorney's office into the shooting haven't been released, and the family says that the Boston Police Department has refused to turn over information about its own investigation.
“There's a systemic issue of police brutality, and also a system that allows officers to be judge, jury and executioner,” Bannon said. “The fact that they can put the narrative out and then investigate themselves. I mean, there's no other profession where you could do that.”
Bannon, who helped organize the rally and march with Impacted Families, says her goal is to seek justice for her family and shine a light on the issue of police violence against people with mental illnesses, and spread awareness to those who might not think the issue affects their community.
“Being white, I feel even more of an obligation to to wake up my community or people who live in my neighborhood who can't really understand this or understand the pain or even understand what's happening to people,” Bannon said. “I think it's unfortunate that there's a certain amount of the population that's not really aware of what's going on.”
After hours of testimonies, family members marched from the Washington Monument to the Department of Justice, holding signs, banners and pictures of their loved ones, chanting “reopen the cases” and “prosecute the police.”
Outside the Justice Department, Deborah Watts, a cousin of Emmett Till, stood before the crowd, joining the rally on the 66th anniversary of Till's death.
Since Till's brutal murder in Mississippi, Watts said the family is still fighting — now seeking legal consequences for Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who told the lie about Till that led to his lynching in 1955.
Whether it takes months, years, or half a century, Watts told the crowd — do not give up.
“We've been fighting for 66 years, I'm still with you,” Watts said. “We want truth, justice and accountability for our loved ones. Your pain and your passion is powerful. Don't ever let it die.”
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify details in the cases of Danroy "DJ" Henry and Juston Root.
