by Robbie Tolan
Because of this kind of thinking, I believe we as African Americans get tied up in an unwinnable game of trying to make sure that the black victims of gun violence at the hands of the police are portrayed as being beyond reproach. We want to let the world know that the person who was killed had so many positive attributes that they didn’t deserve to die—not just during the incident, like pointing out that Philando Castile had followed every single direction, but afterward.
A white supremacist society looks at blackness as criminal, and so it will do everything from turning a seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin into a menacing black teen monster to calling the black victim a thug. At the same time, the society will infantilize a white man who is well beyond eighteen years old as a “kid.” I remember watching the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil and hearing people call the US Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte a “kid” as they tried to justify him allegedly vandalizing a gas station and lying about having been robbed. He was thirty-two years old. So as compensation, we as black people go to great lengths to prove the virtue of black victims of police violence, which plays right into the white supremacist trap.
Every positive characteristic that could be used to show me as undeserving of being shot was used. I was a Christian and a talented baseball player. I loved my mother. And all of those things were true. But even if I’d been a person with a prison record, who didn’t like my mother, and basically was an unlikeable person, I would have had the exact same right to not be shot. By playing into this notion that my goodness was the key to my righteousness tacitly told the world that there were some black people who did deserve to be shot by the police. The poor. The inarticulate. The ones with funny names like Alize and Shenequa. The vulnerable. The ones with low-hanging pants. If I had to demonstrate that I was a stellar person in order to prove that my being shot was a tragedy, then I was saying that the non-stellar black people were on their own. I reject that, and it’s a fallacy.
When I did one of my first media appearances, I remember one reporter asking, “What advice would you give a young kid, who is a good kid and follows the rules like yourself, but who feels that because something like this happens to a person like you, he’s now lost faith in our law enforcement and justice system? What would you say to him?”
This question still troubles me. I paused while I tried to calculate an answer. It seemed to be the longest couple of seconds of silence. Finally, I simply said, “Ma’am, I really don’t know, I’m sorry.”
Her face seemed to show disappointment with my answer, but then again, what was the answer? Was I supposed to tell this kid to have blind faith in a system that regularly shot and killed black people like myself? Where does this wondrous faith come from? I knew my answer was unsatisfactory, but it was only unsatisfactory because there was no good answer. Telling a young kid to stay on a righteous path is good advice, but it’s not the answer for staying safe. Black people like myself had been killed by the police for walking home, for driving, for walking across the street, for making an illegal lane change, for having their car break down in the middle of the highway, and for simply existing in a space that the white police officer thought they shouldn’t. So how do you come up with an answer for that type of scenario?
I remember when a young black country music singer wanted to make a name for himself, and to get some clicks, he created an “instructional” video for black people on how to not get shot by the police. It was so absurd, and yet when I read the comments, it reinforced my belief that white people think that black people get shot because we’re too dumb to follow directions, so as a result, we deserve it. That’s the system we have.
More importantly, why do Americans want to be reassured that, despite the injustice foisted upon me, I still have faith in a law enforcement system and criminal justice system that failed me? Is it because it protects them, and therefore, although they feel bad that I had suffered because of it, they think the overall goodness of the system works for everyone? Do they think the black bodies lying in the streets are simply an unfortunate series of isolated incidents and that black people should still believe police officers have our best interests at heart? I don’t believe that.
The question bothered me for a long time after it had been asked, to the point where decided to write an online blog post about it.
My entire life I had to keep my nose clean. I was a good student and a pretty good athlete. Never touched a drop of alcohol, minus the annual glass of New Year’s Eve champagne with the family, until I turned 21. I’ve never smoked, done drugs, and I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never been in any kind of major trouble…
I care about people and I love my family to death. I like to make people laugh. When I can help someone out, or put a smile on his or her face, it makes my heart smile. And ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted nothing more than to play baseball; that is my heart.
Being the son of a former Major League veteran, I’m used to the doubt and criticism. It’s been there my entire life. I can handle that. But I was shot in the chest for simply protecting my rights and my parents’ rights, which is much different. I can live with and accept a lot of things; however, injustice will never be one of them. All my life, I’ve never done anything to anyone, but strangers who didn’t even know me have had mean and hateful things to say about me. I’ve received death threats, with many of them believing I “deserved what I got.” And some of them, the truly awful ones, even felt like I deserved more than what I got.
Understand that I will never throw myself, nor ask for, a pity party. But do realize that there are just some people who just want to be hateful for the sake of being hateful. Many people just want everyone else to be as miserable as them. And that’s fine, I may not like it, but I can accept it.
What I do realize is that despite keeping my nose clean my entire life, people talked about me. Despite never being in any kind of trouble, people talked about me. Despite being a good kid, people talked about me. So, after being shot in the chest for refusing to lay down while a cop manhandled my mother; after I flat lined on December 31, 2008, at approximately 2:31 a.m.; after being accused of stealing my own car and driving it to my own house; after all the evidence pointed out my innocence and the officer’s guilt… people STILL talked about me.
I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. So please pay close attention to what I’m about to say because this is me and my most honest; no ego, no arrogance, just one hundred percent genuine…
I don’t care about what anyone thinks of me anymore.
And to this day, I still don’t care what people think of me, with no apologies.
But my character didn’t matter when it came to the white officer Sgt. Cotton. Regardless of whether the statements were true or false, the goal was to create a narrative maintaining that Sgt. Cotton was a standup guy who hadn’t made a mistake in shooting me, but had made a judgment call that any “reasonable” officer would have made. Bellaire officials tried to paint him as a choirboy, someone who’d never been in trouble, and claimed that my shooting was just an unfortunate aberration. But my lawyers had done their research. Plus, as it turned out, so had the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office turned out to be a real ally in our fight for justice in the criminal case, and it was led by two prosecutors for the case, Clint Greenwood and Steven Morris. Soon after the indictment, they asked to meet with me and my family. Their message? Keep telling the truth, no matter what. Nothing compromises a case more than finding inconsistencies in a victim’s story, especially when most juries and judges tend to trust the judgment of police officers who have shot people. We couldn’t afford any slip-ups. To even have a remote chance at getting justice when you are a black person accusing a police officer, you had to be as perfect as possible. To be a white officer, well, you just did what you thought you needed to do, even if you lied.
“We’ve gone over countless videos, pictures, and testimonies, and none of your
stories have changed,” they told us. “Those guys from Bellaire have flip-flopped stories all over the place. Plus, you all are good people. You’re not the raging maniacs that the City of Bellaire is trying to make people believe you are.”
It was then that we began to have faith that the District Attorney’s Office was truly behind the Tolan family. They gave us hope that the criminal justice system, even with all of its racial bias against black shooting victims, just might work for the justice we were seeking. Plus, we had right on our side. No matter how many times we’d been interviewed, we told the same story. Cotton and Edwards? They kept changing their story to make it appear like they weren’t the aggressors but the true victims in this saga. Something else also raised our opinions of the prosecutors. They wanted to do an experiment to prove that Cotton was lying.
As it turned out, Cotton had been proclaiming in his depositions that he’d warned me over and over to lie back on the ground, which we disputed. I wasn’t given any such order, and Cotton claimed that it took five seconds from the time I got to my knees after seeing my mom thrown against the garage until I was shot. He said that I’d gotten up from the ground and run at him, as he commanded that I get back on the ground. He also claimed he took several steps back.
This was a lie. I’d only gotten to one knee before Cotton shot me. Yet, in an incident like the one that night where an officer is supposed to be making life-and-death decisions without much time to think, five seconds is an eternity. The prosecutors wanted to disprove Cotton’s testimony by showing that Cotton had shot me in around two seconds, thus never giving me multiple commands to get on the ground. To do that, we needed to do a re-enactment that was credible to a jury.
“Robbie, you wouldn’t still have the same shoes you wore that night?” Greenwood asked.
“I do,” I said, as I got up from the dining room table to retrieve them. In the back of my closet was a plastic bag with faded teal letters that read “Ben Taub Hospital,” and inside that bag contained everything the nurses had stripped off me on the night of the shooting: socks, the bloodied pants that were cut off me in the operating room, my earring and necklace, and the gray, black, and orange Nike Air Force One shoes I had on when I was shot. The bag hadn’t been opened in nearly a year. My parents had showed it to me right after the Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel interview, but I couldn’t stand to see the bloodied pants, so I never opened it. But for Greenwood and Morris, it was golden that I’d kept them.
“We want to be as thorough and accurate as possible,” they told us. A few days later, Keith Webb, who’d done most of the preliminary depositions, joined them with dozens of photos. The idea was that, in order to re-create what happened, they needed to make sure they knew exactly where my body was in contrast to Cotton, and that meant checking at least ten different pictures of the same blood-soaked doormat. My testimony had to match what Webb saw as an expert in ballistics. Together, our testimony could show Cotton’s exact position based on the angle of where the three shots were fired and where one of the shots entered my chest.
During the re-creations, Greenwood played the role of Cotton, while Morris played the role of my mom. The idea was for me to jump up and immediately run at Greenwood, just as Cotton claimed in his deposition, as Greenwood somehow instinctively shoved Morris, playing my mom, into the garage, while at the same time pulling out his gun, commanding me to get back on the ground, and taking steps back.
“He’s pretty fast,” Cotton said in his deposition when asked about the five seconds it took for me to jump up and run at him. We wanted to do a re-creation to demonstrate that Cotton was lying through his teeth. Also, Cotton wanted to make it appear that he was fearful of being overrun, while at the same time making sure to give me enough warning to stop. But he seemed confused during his deposition about why he felt fearful of me trying to stand up.
“It’s everything together, I couldn’t give a—like a list that would say all of these different things, because there’s all sorts of factors that you’re kind of analyzing and—and seeing stuff as you go along,” Cotton said. “So I really—I couldn’t—I couldn’t say that this list is an all-inclusive list of—of what made me feel that way. Well, not in and of itself, I mean, there—everything together made me believe that, yes. That was one of the things.”
Webb set up the scene outside the house and then marked everyone’s place on the concrete. Greenwood took the clip out of his gun before the reenactment, showing everyone that it was empty, and yeah, that wasn’t an attempt at a funny joke; he wanted to make sure that nothing dumb happened again.
The reenactment reminded me of baseball practice. We did a slow walkthrough of the drill twice before we did at full speed. Five seconds was the magic number because Cotton was so adamant about everything taking five seconds. Again, he wanted to prove that he gave me several commands to get back down during that time, but that, instead, I jumped up and ran at him, giving him no option but to shoot. Webb stood off to the side with the stopwatch ready to record the time.
“Robbie,” Clint asked, “I know you’re about to play baseball this year, but how good of shape were you in then? Had you been working out?”
“Probably better shape,” I responded wryly. “I hadn’t been shot.”
“Okay, let’s do this,” Greenwood said.
Over and over, we re-created that night, and each time gave me shudders. I knew that I had to climb this mental mountain to reach the summit of justice, but damn, if it wasn’t hard. But I did it. Over and over until Morris told us we were done.
“There’s no way Cotton was telling the truth,” Morris concluded. “He kept saying that he gave you several commands to get back down, and that just doesn’t pass the smell test.”
“No way,” Greenwood said. “No way it took you five seconds to jump up and run at him. I mean, everything is happening too fast. If I’m pushing your mother, taking my gun out, aiming it, telling you to stop, and then taking steps back at the same time? No.”
Webb had been keeping track of the times, and they were consistent with my testimony. Each time we’d run through the drill, I was in Greenwood’s face in less than two seconds. Before he could say, “Stop,” he and I were nose to nose. My slowest time was 1.6 seconds, not 5 seconds. This meant that what I said was true. I’d gotten to one knee, and then he shot me.
“And I did all of my movements because I knew to do it. It was premeditated,” Greenwood said. “There’s no way Cotton did all of that instinctively in that amount of time. There’s no way he’s telling the truth.”
“Why don’t we videotape the re-creation for the trial?” I asked.
“If we did that,” Greenwood explained, “then we’d have to enter it into evidence. I’m thinking that I want to do the demonstration live in the courtroom so they won’t know what hit ’em.” And so with that, Greenwood and Morris were ready to present our case. As for me, I needed to get back to working toward my pre-shooting self.
Part of my rehabilitation for getting back to normal meant getting back to doing what I loved to do, which was to play baseball. When I was in the hospital, and then doing rehab at Aunt Carolyn’s house, baseball seemed like a distant memory, almost like an impossible dream. The idea of hitting a baseball when I was simply trying to breathe on one lung was ridiculous. Running around the bases with speed and precision? A ludicrous idea when I needed a walker and someone behind me, just to protect me from falling over. Hell, I couldn’t even go to the bathroom by myself. I was as far away from playing baseball as Jeffrey Cotton was from being named Man of the Year by Black Lives Matter.
But then, through hard work and a lot of pain, I began getting better. After a year of small steps, the dream of baseball began replacing the nightmare of getting shot. I needed a path back, someone to believe in me, and to be honest, I didn’t know where to find that person. But I have this belief that if you’re a good person who does things for others, eventually the universe and God will look out for you. And soon Dmitri Yo
ung came back into my life.
You know how kids go to their parents’ office on “Bring Your Kid to Work Day”? Well, it just so happened that my dad’s office was the Major League dugouts and clubhouses, so I was always meeting players when they came to play the Houston Astros. Even though Dmitri Young played for the Cincinnati Reds, we became quick friends, to the point where I’d nicknamed him DY. That’s a big deal when you’re a twelve-or thirteen-year-old snot-nosed kid who dreams of being like your baseball heroes. I didn’t just know Dmitri Young; he was DY!
Dmitri was amazingly down to earth, even to a little kid. In a sport where you can be “on” all the time, you know, have a public persona that is hard to penetrate because you don’t want people to know the real you, Dmitri wasn’t that guy. His personality was approachable, and he always had time for me. I was sad when he was traded to the Detroit Tigers because it meant that we wouldn’t be able to see each other as often. This was before interleague play, and since the Tigers are in the American League and the Houston Astros were, at the time, in the National League, it was like I was on Earth and Dmitri was on Mars. But then, one day, we saw each other at an annual conference, and that was my path back to baseball.
The Baseball Assistance Team, or B.A.T., is a nonprofit organization designed to help current and former baseball players tackle financial and medical hardships. Not all Major League Baseball players, like my dad for instance, were able to take advantage of the multi-million-dollar contracts that came through free agency in the 1980s to today. My dad made enough to be comfortable, but like many players from the 1960s and 1970s, he still worked during the off season. In fact, my dad still works to this day, sometimes as an Uber driver, just to make ends meet.