Innocent and Executed: Dijon, Breonna & Emmett

Rest in Peace: Dijon Kizzee 1991-2020

 

Details on the life and death of Dijon Kizzee, shot in the back by police 15 times,  fill half the front page of Part B of the Los Angeles Times this morning.

He was riding his bicycle on Monday afternoon in Westmont, an unincorporated neighborhood between Inglewood and South Los Angeles, 4-5 miles from the Watts Towers and Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital.  Police saw some unnamed violation of the vehicle code for bicycle riders, tried to stop him, chased him a block, and executed him.

His mother had moved out of Westmont with its crime problems when he was a teenager, choosing Lancaster, 75 miles north, as a safer place to raise her sons.  His father was serving time.    

But his mother had health issues and died when he was 20, leaving him to care for his little brother.  

His uncle, Anthony Johnson, said, "There's really two Dijons. The Dijon before she passed away and the Dijon after she passed away," according to Leila Miller, who interviewed his friends and family. Within 6 years he was sent to state prison for driving recklessly and attempting to evade a peace officer.  After he was released, he went back to prison briefly for possession of a firearm.

He lived in Lancaster and began working as a plumber, but by the summer of Covid, he was unemployed.  He often visited friends in Westmont.  

"He was still trying to find his way," his uncle said.  

Life had dealt him some heavy blows, but he was coping--until he was killed.

His young black life didn't matter to the police trainee and his supervising officer.  They claimed he was carrying a gun wrapped in a jacket, and it became visible when he fell down.  They claimed he reached for it while lying on the ground--a reason to shoot him?  No.  And certainly not a reason to unload 15 bullets into his back.

The police killed him and scratched another atrocity into the minds of everyone in Los Angeles and the USA.  The spring and summer of videotaped police murder goes on.

I sat at my kitchen table reading all this for much of Friday--I'm retired, so my time is my own until another atrocity happens.

But then on Friday night a new documentary aired on my FX cable channel: "The Killing of Breonna Taylor" produced by "The New York Times Presents" using videos, recordings, 

 

911 calls, interviews, and police records gathered while reporters worked on stories about Breonna's death.  It's also streaming on Hulu.

I was mesmerized, learning that the Louisville Metro Police Department was conducting five no-knock raids that night to apprehend Breonna's ex; 8-10 officers were sent to Breonna's apartment though the ex-boyfriend no longer lived there.

One of the officers, Brett Hankison, had  "received multiple complaints of excessive use of force as well as sexual misconduct, according to portions of his personnel file obtained by The Times."  They broke open Breonna's door with a battering ram and sprayed bullets through the apartment and two neighboring ones.

This random collection of officers was poorly equipped; their no-knock raid was changed at the last minute to a "knock-and-announce" raid, but the announcement was done poorly if at all.  Breonna's current boyfriend thought it was an intruder and fired in self-defense the gun he was legally licensed to carry.

"They were undercover, not using body cameras, and wearing tactical vests, not the elaborate protective gear worn by the SWAT team. An ambulance on standby outside was told to leave about an hour before the raid, counter to standard practice," reports The Times.

The photos of bullet holes all over the walls tell the rest of the story.  Breonna, age 26, was hit five times and killed. 

Sobered by the graphic details of this documentary, I went to check email on my computer before going to bed.  But one email was from the website Medium highlighting a story by a reporter who made a pilgrimage to all the sites associated with the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 in Mississippi.  

Of course, down the rabbit hole I went on a journey through the last day of Emmett's life and the events that followed.  I recommend you take this journey too by clicking on this link: https://gen.medium.com/the-unfinished-story-of-emmett-tills-final-journey-dba0fcd4f358

Alexandra Marvar visits:

• Remains of Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, where supposedly Emmett Till whistled at a 21-year-old white woman.
• The barn where he was not beaten to death and a more likely barn where the beating took place.
• The bridge where Emmett Till's body was possibly dropped into the Tallahatchie River.
• Graball Landing, where his body was recovered three miles down river.
• Remains of the Tutwiler Funeral Home where his body was embalmed to be returned to Chicago for viewing.
• The restored courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where a brief trial exonerated the killers.
• The Emmet Till Historic Intrepid Center, set up in the building of a former cotton gin. (The fan of a cotton gin was used to weigh down his body when it was thrown into the river.)

The commemorative markers for these sites are battered by bullets and sometimes stolen. Alexandra's journey is guided by a book by David Tell, historian and professor at the University of Kansas, Remembering Emmett Till (2019).  

Three innocent young black lives were ended by racism in the years 1955 and 2020.

Say their names: Dijon Kizzee, Breonna Taylor, and Emmett Till.

A newspaper, a video documentary, and an article brought these lives and deaths into focus for me, all on September 4, 2020, as the summer of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter closes, as protestors and hashtags battle for control over the next four years.

The Unfinished Story of Emmett Till’s Final Journey

Till was murdered 65 years ago. Sites of commemoration across the Mississippi Delta still struggle with what’s history and what’s hearsay. By featured New York Times writer Alexandra Marvar.

In Memoriam: George Floyd, age 46

George Floyd, selfie (Wikipedia)

For 46 years, George Floyd successfully negotiated the dangers surrounding him as an African-American in the USA.

He was born and raised in Houston, Texas.  He played several sports in high school and graduated in 1993.

"At 6 ft. 6 in, Floyd emerged as a star football player, positioned as the tight end for Jack Yates’ high school team, and played in the 1992 state championship game in the Houston Astrodome," writes Joanna Walters for The Guardian.  

He became a rapper associated with a hip hop group named Screwed Up Click--a dream come true for many young men.  He "freeestyled under the alias 'Big Floyd'on mix tapes released by DJ Screw," reports Wikipedia.  What a personality it took to succeed in that world!

He was known as "the gentle giant," but in 2007, he made a wrong move or two.  In 2009 "he was sentenced to five years in prison for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon," Wikipedia continues.

George was released in 2014 and moved to Minnesota, where some friends lived, to start a new life.  He succeeded there, working as a restaurant security guard in Minneapolis for five years.  Not everyone with a prison record gets and keeps a job and stays out of prison.

He was doing so well, but during the Covid-19 pandemic, his restaurant closed and he lost his job.  

Then on Monday, May 25, he allegedly went into a small convenience store and paid for cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill.  Did he know it was counterfeit?  The clerk called police.

He was still there, sitting in the driver's seat of an SUV parked across from the store around 8 pm, when four white officers in a police car pulled up, ordered him out of his car, and arrested him.  He appears cooperative in videos filmed by bystanders.  But soon he is on his stomach on the ground with his hands cuffed behind him. And one officer rams his knee into George's neck, keeping it there for about 8 minutes.

"Please, please, I can't breathe," he says.

"He can't breathe," say the bystanders.  "Let up on him."

"Do you think we should turn him onto his side?" suggests one of the three other police officers. But Derek Chauvin says no and keeps his knee pressed firmly against his victim's neck.

Soon George is unresponsive.  When they finally lift him onto a stretcher, his head rolls and hangs down from his lifeless body.

George Floyd was murdered, and his death-in-progress is now shown on every television screen in the nation and the world.

He leaves two daughters, one six years old and one 22 years old, both living in Houston.

Flowers to everyone who is suffering from the death of George Floyd:
I'm sorry for your loss.

He leaves a legacy:
tributes from friends, family, 
from singers and rappers, from Paris Jackson, 
from Beyonce, Lebron James, Whoopi Goldberg,
from ESPN personality Steven A. Smith, basketball player Steven Jackson,
from Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Cory Booker, and many others.



He also leaves protests around the USA including the burned-down 3rd precinct police station in Minneapolis where these four officers were employed.

During this week, when the number of Covid-19 deaths in the USA passed 100,000, we thought things couldn't get any worse.

But now Americans are grieving the death of George Floyd and many other African-Americans as well as our 100,000 victims to a virus:
Breonna Taylor, killed March 14 in her own bed, age 26, EMT, Louisville KY.
Ahmaud Arbery, killed Feb. 23 while jogging, age 25, Brunswick GA.
Philando Castile, killed July 6 2016, age 32, traffic stop, St. Anthony, Minnesota.
Sandra Bland, killed July 13 2015, age 28, traffic stop, Waller Co., TX.
Eric Garner, killed July 17 2014, age 43, selling cigarettes, Staten Island NY, "I can't breathe."
Michael Brown Jr., killed August 9 2014, age 18, Ferguson MO, "Hands up! Don't shoot!"

And many others.  Black lives matter.

We waited all week for these four officers to be arrested and charged.  Today Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with murder in the third degree and with manslaughter.  He could get 25 years if convicted of manslaughter--or he could get parole. 

"Black lives don't matter," says one of my friends.  Many people agree with her and are out on the streets in major cities as I sit at my PC: Louisville KY, Oakland CA, Minneapolis, Denver, Atlanta, Los Angeles... 

May Minnesota and the whole nation take significant steps toward justice.


*Thank you to Tiana Marquez of Ann Arbor, Michigan, for these beautiful flowers sent to my family in memoriam for my cousin's wife, who died on May 22.