Beyond Trayvon Martin: Calls For Justice Surface For Other Senseless Deaths

March 28th, 2012 by Arturo

She told officers she couldn’t get out of the police car, so they dragged her by her arms into the station. They left her lying on the concrete floor of a jail cell, moaning and struggling to breathe. Just 15 minutes later, a jail worker found her cold to the touch.

Officers suspected Brown was using drugs. Autopsy results showed she had no drugs in her system.

Six months later, family members still wonder how Brown’s sprained ankle led to her death in police custody, and whether anyone — including themselves — is to blame.

“She was not a drug dealer or a hooker or doing other things that she could’ve ended up dead for,” Brown’s sister, Krystle, told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “People assume things because of they way they talk or the way they live or the things they do. My sister is not here today because people passed judgement.”

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Posted in islamophobia, legal issues, policing/justice, racism, violence against women, violence against women of colour & indigenous women | 9 comments

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  • Mickey

    Oh. My. God. If this does not prove even more that POC lives are not valued, I don’t know what will. This type of fuckery is beyond comprehension.

  • Anonymous

    Cosign.

  • Anonymous

    Cosign.

  • Rebecca A

    Post racism? Equality? Our people are dying in the streets by police TODAY. You can’t keep sweep things under rugs. At one point, the bodies rack up and the smell becomes too hard to ignore. We need to do something. Now. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002966416643 Anita Jones

    And there’s this case, in Wisconsin. I grew up in the county where this happened, and it is quite possibly the most obscenely racist place I’ve ever been.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/26/bo-morrison-killing-like-trayvon-martin_n_1381325.html

  • kim

    2 Black women killed by POLICE. The police also initially kept quiet about the “go back to your country you terrorist” note found on the Iraqi woman who was the clear victim of a hate crime. Unfuckingreal. I notice the reporters played down the language of the note until the daughter stated what it really said.

  • Anonymous

    I am surprised that Kenneth Chamberlain hasn’t been mentioned yet: “On
    the morning of November 19th, a 68-year-old African American Marines veteran named Kenneth
    Chamberlain with a heart condition accidentally pressed the button on
    his medical alert pendant while sleeping. Responding to the alert, police
    officers from the city of White Plains, New York, arrived at
    Chamberlain’s apartment in a public housing complex shortly after 5 a.m.
    By the time the police left the apartment, Kenneth Chamberlain was
    dead, shot twice in the chest by a police officer inside his home.
    Police gained entry to Chamberlain’s apartment only after they took his
    front door off its hinges. Officers first shot him with a taser, then a
    beanbag shotgun, and then with live ammunition. Kenneth Chamberlain can be heard on an audio recording of his call to
    the medical alert system operator saying, quote, “Please leave me alone.
    I’m 68 with a heart condition. Why are you doing this to me? Can you
    please leave me alone?” Officers responded by calling
    Chamberlain a racial slur while urging him to open the door. The audio
    recording of the incident has not been made public and remains in the
    possession of the Westchester District Attorney’s office.”

    http://www.alternet.org/rights/154757/racially-motivated_killing_the_media_missed_ny_police_called_out_on_medical_alert_shoot_dead_68_year_old_black_veteran

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