As Tyre Nichols lay unresponsive in intensive care after he was beaten by Memphis police in January 2023, his mother, RowVaughn Wells, couldn’t bear to tell the people closest to them that he was dying. The 29-year-old had suffered irreversible brain damage from blunt force to the skull delivered by police officers after a traffic stop. Three days after the beating, Nichols was taken off life support. In the nearly two years since, Wells has found herself anguishing repeatedly over what to say and when to say it, the Washington Post reports. At the federal courthouse, she spent weeks watching three of the men who beat her son stand trial for allegedly violating his civil rights, then be acquitted of the most serious charges.
As the men were taken away in handcuffs, facing prison time for lesser counts, Nichols’s family and local activists spilled out of the courtroom trying not to show their anger. Instead of loading onto elevators, they looked to the woman they refer to as “Mama Row,” or, as one family friend calls her, “The Warden.” “All of them have been convicted of something, and they’re going to jail,” Wells said. She later told the Post,
“They found them guilty of something, so, to our family, that felt like a piece of justice for us, because a lot of families don’t even get that. So we’ll keep getting a piece of justice here, a piece of justice there.” This month’s federal civil rights trial was the first of three major legal battles related to Nichols’s death. The officers still face second-degree murder charges at the state level. And the city faces a $550 million civil suit filed by the family. As the legal cases have inched forward, Wells has become a national spokeswoman for police reform, traveling to support other parents whose children were slain by police and advocating the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that twice stalled in Congress.
Comments