On May 30, I got a text from Jermaine. It was a photo of himself at a #BlackLivesMatter protest downtown. Photog @bencamach0 had captured him walking past a burning trash can. Jermaine was so proud to have participated in the peaceful call for the reimagining of public safety.
I had first met Jermaine a year earlier, at Crenshaw and Slauson. He was waiting for the funeral procession for #NipseyHussle to come through and he stood out in his white suit.
And of course those shoes were one-of-a-kind. He'd had them custom painted with Nip's likeness.
la.streetsblog.org/2019/04/12/sou…
We sat down & talked for hours last year about what he'd been through coming up in the same kind of environment as Nipsey. So when he reached out at the end of May, I asked if he wanted to talk about his experience w/ LAPD for a story.
Three nights later he was shot six times.
Reports of what happened that night remain muddled. There was a large crowd gathered at Broadway-Manchester after curfew. He saw them as he approached the intersection. Suddenly he says he heard "f*ck the cops!," saw a bright light, and heard a burst of gunfire.
Neighbors all around heard the shots and watched police round up just about everyone they could get their hands on.
But Jermaine wouldn't find out the cops had been on the scene - and that he had possibly been shot by one - until after the fact.
All he knew is that he woke up in restraints, suspected of being connected to his own attempted murder.
News reports accepted LAPD's claim that those taken to the hospital had been connected to the shooting in some way.
But no one questioned why an officer would arrive on the scene and immediately begin firing into the crowd.
ktla.com/news/local-new…
LAPD's own official statement did not offer any clarification. As always, any vectors or agency on the part of the officer were scrubbed away, making the firing of shots sound like an inevitable outcome. lapdonline.org/newsroom/news_…
When LAPD showed up at Jermaine's bedside to ask what he remembered from that night, he tried to explain he'd been out making deliveries when he got hit, but he says they weren't that interested in hearing what he had to say.
On 6/25, when he went to retrieve his shoes, his phone, and the $3000 he'd collected doing deliveries that night, he realized they'd never even bothered to contact his employer. Instead, they hit him w/ a warrant for his phone letting them search it back to Jan of 2019.
LAPD had a shooting they needed to explain away and part of that process appeared to entail casting as wide a net as possible in order to be able to claim he was a threat to the officers that arrived on the scene.
Meanwhile, Jermaine is now homeless and sleeps in the car he was still cleaning blood out of last week...something that adds to the trauma he is already struggling with.
Read the full story here
la.streetsblog.org/2020/07/13/bys…
If you have a few extra dollars to spare during this emergency period, Jermaine's gofundme - kindly set up by a friend of his - is here.
gofundme.com/f/victim-of-cu…
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.