They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  Netta was deeply suspicious of the media, not unlike many of the families and friends of police shooting victims I had encountered before. So often, distrust of police was matched, if not exceeded, by deep suspicion of the media—and very often that suspicion was born from a moment in their past. And in my experience, a man or woman who has been burned or betrayed by the media wants one thing. Not a correction, or a rehabilitative article: they want to be heard, to be able to explain the injustice they believed was dealt to them so that their pain is validated.

  Netta’s personal distrust of the media began earlier that year, just two weeks after her mother’s death. Sitting on her aunt’s couch that afternoon, surfing social media, she saw a Facebook post she didn’t think could be true:

  “RIP Stephon.”

  She got the phone call from another mutual friend. It was true. Stephon Averyhart was dead. Just weeks after losing her mother, she had lost a close friend. Netta was shattered.

  They had met almost five years earlier, when one of her closest friends began dating one of his. As the friend groups began to merge, the two found that they just clicked. First they’d text each other when their friends were meeting up, to make sure the other would be attending. Then they’d make sure they linked up anytime Netta was back in town from school over a holiday.

  Eventually, Stephon began inviting Netta with him to the highlight of his week: Sunday-night drag racing in downtown St. Louis. Netta remembers Stephon as a showman, a clown, who would go out of his way to make everyone laugh as they sat around someone’s living room or basement, or when they’d head out to a bar or club or restaurant.

  He was the friend group’s Mr. Fix-It, getting much of his money from working odd jobs on cars and buying old beater vehicles, fixing them up, and reselling them. When you talk to his friends now, one of the first things they all recall is that Stephon had a hustle about him.

  While everyone else had upgraded to smartphones, Stephon was still carrying around an old black flip phone.

  “As long as it rings and I can keep getting my money, it works!” Stephon would shout as his friends would burst into laughter each time his dated ringtone would interrupt a hangout.

  The police said Averyhart had fled from a traffic stop—prompting a police chase that included a spike strip and a helicopter. When Averyhart crashed his car, he allegedly jumped from it and ran with a gun in his hand. Then, having trapped him in an alleyway, the officers said they saw him raise the gun in their direction.

  Pieces by local television stations often mistakenly described Averyhart as a felon, but his only major crime had been fleeing the police during what ended up being his fatal encounter. Otherwise, Averyhart had no criminal record other than a few unpaid traffic tickets and a misdemeanor marijuana charge.Articles published on the websites of several St. Louis television stations repeated the erroneous charge, and a sea of online commenters called him a thug, a lowlife, someone who deserved to be killed, and whom the world was better without. “The comment section was so horrible,” Netta recalled as we discussed Stephon’s death more than a year later. “That was my first time really realizing that these racist people from the Internet are real-life people. This person saying these horrible things about my dead friend could be my neighbor.”

  But Stephon Averyhart had the misfortune of being a black man shot and killed by the police before Ferguson. His killing drew almost no media scrutiny, besides the occasional article in the Riverfront Times, a scrappy weekly newspaper in St. Louis, which continued to follow the case.

  Averyhart’s mother, Stacey Hill, was sitting at home when she got the phone call telling her that the St. Louis police had shot her only son. The fifty-four-year-old mother had spent her entire life in St. Louis, where she still works at a local grocery store decorating cakes for birthdays and graduations. And funerals.

  Stephon had been on the way to an auto parts store to pick up supplies for one of his mechanic jobs. His mother still says he should have been a race car driver, so much did he love driving fast from the first time he ever sat behind a wheel. And he was driving fast on that day when the flashing lights pulled up behind him. He had no criminal record and, his family insists, was carrying his gun legally. But he did commit a crime—he ran from the officers who tried to pull him over.

  Hill wishes her son hadn’t run. But she understands why he did.

  Black residents in St. Louis all fear the traffic stop. Departments in Greater St. Louis are known for using them to milk revenue for their city’s bottom line, often stacking multiple violations into a single citation. When tickets go unpaid, a warrant is issued. On the day Mike Brown was killed, Ferguson had almost as many active warrants as it did residents.

  Stephon Averyhart had an outstanding traffic warrant.

  After the first call, Stacey Hill raced to the scene of the shooting. Unable to get answers, she tried the hospital—where workers and security guards wouldn’t tell her if Stephon was dead or alive. After several hours, she went home and waited. Finally, she got a call summoning her to the medical examiner’s office.

  Hill was heartbroken. And then she became angry. She read all the headlines calling her only son an ex-con and a felon. Those same articles declared that Stephon had pointed a gun at the officers chasing him, but she just didn’t believe it. The investigation would clear her son, she knew it.

  But few things move as slowly, under such a unique cloak of darkness, as an investigation into an officer-involved shooting.

  It was months before she got a call from a St. Louis police sergeant, in September 2014. The shooting of Michael Brown had thrust all local police departments under public scrutiny. They wanted to give her an update. Hill says she was told that the initial police story was wrong. Her son had never actually pointed the gun; rather, he was reaching down to pick it up off the ground when he was shot.

  “My son deserved to go to jail that day,” Hill still says. “He did not deserve to die.”

  Hill begged the sergeant to have the department issue a new press release to correct the record. She asked for the officers’ names and was told that those, too, were unavailable to her—the investigation was ongoing. To date, it still is.

  She went home and waited. Almost two years after that meeting, she is still waiting.

  For Netta, the pain that pushed her to protest began privately with the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, as well as the execution of Troy Davis—a Georgia inmate whose appeals of his death sentence became a rallying cry around the same time that the story of Trayvon Martin reached its apex. This private feeling of sorrow was compounded by the two police shootings that would define the next years of Netta’s life—one of a man, Stephon Averyhart, whom she knew and loved, and the other of a man, Mike Brown, whom she had never known.

  In February 2016, two years after Stephon was killed and eighteen months after the unrest in Ferguson, I called the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and asked about the status of the investigation into Stephon’s shooting. The department continued to refuse to release the names of the officers involved. They also wouldn’t give me any other information about why Stephon had been pulled over or why he had been shot. All they would release in terms of documents was a two-page preliminary police report, for which they charged me six dollars. The investigation into the shooting—which occurred six months before that of Michael Brown—remains active.

  I called Stacey Hill back and asked her if she had heard anything else. Sometime in 2015 the captain had called her into the police station and told her he had something to give her. During this meeting, he handed over a more-than-forty-page case file, which included the same two useless pages that I had been given as well as a full readout of the incident report.

  The report, which Stacey Hill sent to me via FedEx next-day delivery, stated that a St. Louis Metropolitan Police helicopter began following Averyhart after he fled the traffic stop, around 11:50 a.m. on February 12, 2014. After officers deployed spike strip
s, the report says Averyhart ditched his car in an alley and began running, with a gun in his hand. Not far behind were two officers, now pursuing him on foot.

  As Stephon ran down another alley, he attempted to throw the gun over a tall wooden fence, but he miscalculated the height. The pistol, according to the account of the shooting given by a police officer who was watching from a helicopter, hit the top of the fence and landed back in the alley at Averyhart’s feet. Initially, Averyhart kept running. Then he paused, turned around, and bent over to pick the weapon back up. At that moment, according to the officer with the bird’s-eye view, the two officers who had been running after Averyhart rounded the corner, pulled their guns, and opened fire.

  “We could see the detectives draw their firearms and then the suspect fall to the ground,” John Furrer, the officer in the helicopter, said in his statement to investigators. “Detectives advised over the radio that shots had been fired. The suspect laid in the alley motionless.”

  So what actually happened in that alley? Did Averyhart really threateningly “raise” the gun at officers, or was he in the act of picking it up when officers ran up on him, got spooked, and opened fire? Will the officers involved be charged? Probably not. And when will Stacey Hill get some of the answers she still so desperately desires? It’s unclear if she ever will.

  Much as they did on the last two days, crowds had gathered near the street where Michael Brown had been killed and were rallying at the charred remains of the QuikTrip gas station on the evening of August 11, 2014. Night began to fall, and the crowds grew increasingly angry as heavily armored police officers began threatening to deploy tear gas if they did not disperse.

  After leaving the Brown family’s press conference, I had driven across town to meet up with Netta and a handful of other young residents and soon-to-be activists outside the NAACP meeting and then asked them to direct me back into Ferguson.

  “Slow down,” Netta urged as I whipped my rental car around a suburban side street. “The cops around here don’t play when it comes to speeding tickets.” I probably should have known as much, but it was still just my first day in Ferguson.

  After I parked my car just up the street, at the home of one of Netta’s friends, we made our way toward the intersection of Nesbit and West Florissant, where it appeared about three dozen people were squaring off against police officers.

  “I’m under siege,” said Donald Harry, the owner of a single-story house that sat at the corner of Nesbit Street and West Florissant Avenue. Across the street stood dozens of residents shouting at the cops. A block in the other direction, behind Harry’s home, stood armored police vehicles and an advancing line of officers. Harry was trapped in the middle of the chaos.

  The previous night, rioters had shot out the back window of the black SUV that sat in Harry’s driveway. When he heard yelling and commotion outside, and threatening declarations from the police officers, he got worried and left his house.

  “I’ve got my family in here,” Harry told me, pointing back at his home. I was jotting down the rest of his sentence when Harry grabbed me, shoving me sideways onto the ground and toward his shrubbery. The police had begun firing tear gas, and while my head was buried in a notebook, I hadn’t noticed the canister that had landed inches from our feet.

  Soon the corner on which we were standing was engulfed in a cloud of tear gas. Covering my face with the collar of my sweater, I glanced behind me in time to see Netta clutch the top of her chest.

  “Are they shooting us? Did I just get hit with something?” she screamed. The rubber bullet that had struck her chest was now lying at her feet.

  We both started running back toward the car.

  “I was just trying to get to my sister’s house!” cried one twenty-three-year-old, who lay sobbing on a lawn.

  He said he was walking home when officers approached him, sprayed tear gas in his face, and peppered him with rubber bullets. His friends pleaded with an ambulance to hurry, and a neighbor offered to drive him to the hospital.

  “I don’t need a hospital!” the man yelled. “This is my home.”

  The police aggression only further incited the crowd, with some lying in the street with hands in the air: “Don’t shoot!” they chanted. Others added: “Go home, killers!” Others fled, crying out for water as stinging tear gas bit at their eyes.

  While many residents of Ferguson had been deeply outraged by the violence and looting of the previous night, what upset them even more was the nightly militarized response of law enforcement. These suburban families weren’t used to seeing officers in riot gear, which further ingrained the image of a hostile occupying force in the minds of residents whose support would have been vital for the police to maintain order.

  As the night wore on, residents who remained outside began to regroup. Many refused to leave the streets. Others were physically incapable. As police moved up West Florissant, many residents said they were trapped. The neighborhood consists of a series of cul-de-sacs with one main road stretching between them, and each one was now blocked by police.

  After running to the car for a bottle of water, I decided—despite Netta’s warnings—to move back up toward the tear gas to see what was going on. As I made my way up the street, I ran into twenty-five-year-old Edward Crawford.

  “This is beyond Mike Brown, this is about all of us,” Crawford told me, insisting that the reason he had come out into the streets was because he had previously been subject to traffic stops and searches and had felt he was harassed by Ferguson police because of the color of his skin. A young father who worked as a waiter, Crawford had joined the protests not long before the tear gas and rubber bullets were deployed. “The looting was wrong, but so is this. This is excessive force,” he said as a tear gas canister landed just behind his feet.

  As I made my way back to my car for the final time, I ran into Crawford again.

  Two nights later, he and I would both be thrust into the national narrative—as I would sit in a jail cell in the basement of the Ferguson Police Department, Crawford would again join the protests. This time, wearing an American flag tank top and eating a bag of chips, he would race to a canister of tear gas fired on the protesters and, in an act captured by the camera of Post-Dispatch photographer Robert Cohen, toss it through the air back toward the police officers. The image went viral, becoming perhaps the single most recognizable symbol from the Ferguson unrest. But tonight, Crawford was no symbol, and he was no hero. He was just a scared resident who was convinced that this aggression from the police might never stop.

  “You’re gonna write your story, and you’re gonna leave town, and nothing is going to change,” Crawford told me as the late hours of Monday turned into the early hours of Tuesday. “One day, one month, one year from now, after you leave, it’s still going to be fucked up in Ferguson.”

  Based on the early media coverage, there appeared to be little if any effort to distinguish between organic expressions of outrage and pain that manifested in peaceful protests—both those unplanned and those days later, which were more deliberately organized—and those that boiled over into violence. This was, at least in part, due to our addiction to the exciting, to “breaking” coverage, which emphasizes emotional urgency and sacrifices accuracy and nuance on the altar of immediacy. “Buildings are burning!” an anchor would declare, with little discussion of how circumstances had changed since the last dispatch from what an hour earlier had been a peaceful demonstration. Any person standing on a street was now a “protester,” whether they were part of an organized demonstration or just standing on their own front stoop. You could see how it would be easy to assume that these same “protesters” waving signs and organizing groups and demonstrations were the very same “protesters” throwing rocks and starting fires. But most often, they weren’t.

  As the unrest stretched from days into weeks, it began to gain levels of organization. Several new activists’ groups—led by time-tested local organizers like Montague Simmons, who w
orked with the decades-old St. Louis activism group Organization for Black Struggle, and Derek Laney of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), as well as by young people who were relatively new to activism, like local rapper Tef Poe and Taureen “Tory” Russell, who cofounded the group Hands Up United; and Ashley Yates, Larry Fellows, Alexis Templeton, and Brittany Ferrell, who were among those who launched Millennial Activists United—began coordinating acts of civil disobedience, marches, and rallies. The bitter taste of injustice is intoxicating on the tongue of a traumatized people.

  Organized protests—unlike the half dozen or so nights of rioting—almost never resulted in violence, except for tear gas from responding officers. The momentum seemed to keep growing in the streets, spurred on, in part, by the simple truth that police kept killing people.

  On Tuesday, August 19, twenty-five-year-old Kajieme Powell robbed a corner store about four miles from the site where Brown had been killed. According to the police account, the young man brandished a knife and stole two energy drinks and some donuts. Responding officers demanded he take his hands out of his pockets. Powell yelled, “Shoot me!” They obliged. Police said the boy, who had a history of mental illness, had come within three feet of the officers. Cell phone video later recorded by a witness showed that it was more like fifteen feet. Several dozen shots were fired after Powell had already been hit and was lying on the ground.

  “They could have shot him in the ass, they could have shot him in the legs. They didn’t have to slaughter him,” said Floyd Blackwell, the former mayor of nearby Cool Valley, a two-thousand-person city that is nearly 85 percent black, and whose kids attended the same schools as Michael Brown.

  In late September, a Ferguson police officer chasing a young man behind the community center was shot in the arm. But rumors quickly spread through the streets that it was the young black man, not the officer, who had been shot. Officers had to act quickly to calm an emotional crowd outside the police station, insisting that the only gunshot victim that night had been the officer.