COLUMBUS, Ohio — It was Valentine’s Day when Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, moved into the foster home where her younger sister had lived for more than a year. The girls were close, and would dance and make TikTok videos together, while Bryant nurtured a constant hope: to one day live again with her biological mother.
“That’s all she said, was, ‘I want to be with my mom,’” said Angela Moore, who said she provided foster care for Bryant and her sister on a quiet block on the southeastern edge of Columbus, Ohio.
Those dreams were cut short after a Columbus police officer fatally shot Bryant on Tuesday afternoon, just moments after arriving at a chaotic disturbance outside her foster home. Body-camera footage released by the Columbus police appears to show Bryant holding a knife as she lunges toward another person a moment before she is shot.
Her death fanned new waves of sorrow, anger and protest Wednesday over yet another police killing. And its timing — just minutes before a jury in Minneapolis convicted Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd — was a grim reminder of an unceasing tally of killings by the police.
As the White House on Wednesday described Bryant’s death as “tragic,” law enforcement authorities in Columbus pleaded for patience from the community as they released 911 calls and new body-camera videos showing the frenzied moments surrounding her shooting.
Michael Woods, the interim chief of the Columbus Division of Police, identified the officer who shot Bryant as Nicholas Reardon, and said he had been on the force since December 2019.
“Under any circumstance, that is a horrendous tragedy,” Ned Pettus Jr., the city’s public safety director, said during a news conference Wednesday. “But the video shows there is more to this. It requires us to pause, take a close look at the sequence of events, and though it’s not easy, wait for the facts as is determined by an independent investigation.”
Pettus said a third-party investigation being conducted by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation would need to answer key questions, including what information Reardon had, what he saw at the scene, and what would have happened if he “had taken no action at all.”
The first 911 call that brought the police to the house came at 4:32 p.m. Tuesday. It is a cacophony of screaming. The caller, who sounds like a younger woman, says that someone was “trying to stab us” and had “put hands” on the caller’s grandmother. The dispatcher asks again and again whether the caller has seen any weapons.
By: Kevin Williams, Jack Healy and Will Wright
c.2021 The New York Times Company
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