TUPELO,
Miss. — The blue lights flashed in the rearview mirror of the Ford
Focus. The man behind the wheel, a 37-year-old African-American, pulled
over, opened the door and sprinted into the Mississippi night.
Soon, a white police officer was giving chase on foot, accompanied by his police dog.
The
officer would eventually find and fatally shoot the man, Antwun
Shumpert, here on the evening of June 18, plunging this small city —
famous globally as the birthplace of Elvis Presley,
but known regionally as a beacon of relatively progressive racial
attitudes — into what has become a tragically common American morass of
anger, racial division and hard questions about the treatment of black
men at the hands of the police.
Mr.
Shumpert’s death poses another question: how to extract the truth from
the familiar story lines and racial narratives that can alternately cast
light on what happened or obscure it.
The
controversy here has also been amplified by assertions, made by Mr.
Shumpert’s defenders and repudiated by city officials, that his killing
echoes some of the cruelest episodes of the South’s past.
The
lawyer for Mr. Shumpert’s family, Carlos Moore, said that Mr. Shumpert
was unarmed and that an attack by the police dog left his groin area
“mutilated.” Mr. Shumpert’s hospital records describe damage to his
groin as a result of a gunshot wound.
Even
so, Mr. Moore last week displayed photos of Mr. Shumpert’s corpse in a
news conference, including one that appeared to show a yawning tear
where his scrotum met his inner thigh. Mr. Moore invoked the lynching of
Emmett Till and the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan, and criticized the city
for not taking down the Mississippi state flag, which incorporates the Confederate battle flag.
“They
have declared open season on us, and they are killing us with
impunity,” said Mr. Moore, who is black. “And the question is: Are you
going to sit there and allow them to do it?”
Tupelo’s
mayor, Jason Shelton, a 40-year-old white Democrat, said that the
police have told him that the dog never bit Mr. Shumpert. And an
Atlanta-based doctor who specializes in emergency medicine and reviewed
the photographs of Mr. Shumpert’s body for The New York Times said on
Friday that he saw little evidence of a dog attack.
Mr.
Shelton said on Thursday that the police told him Mr. Shumpert had
attacked the officer, maneuvering on top of him and repeatedly punching
him in the face. The mayor initially declared the shooting “justified” —
a statement that outraged many black residents here who note that the
Mississippi Bureau of Investigation may not complete its investigation
for months.
By
Friday, Mr. Shelton — who was elected with significant black support in
2013 — was standing among dozens of peaceful protesters in City Hall,
telling them that he should not have used the word “justified.”
But
in a separate interview, he said, “There has been no evidence to
contradict the Tupelo Police Department’s version of the events in this
case.”
Some here said they would withhold judgment until the outcome of the investigation, which is being monitored by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. But the battle lines in this city of 36,000 are hardening.
“Well,
I mean, why did he run? That’s my question,” said Justin Cook, 24, a
white man who was shopping at a Walmart last week. Mr. Cook said he had
little reason to doubt the city.
On
Thursday, Mr. Moore filed a $35 million civil rights lawsuit in Federal
District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi. That evening,
hundreds of anguished residents, nearly all of them African-American,
packed into the Temple of Compassion and Deliverance church for a
community meeting. Some wore T-shirts that declared “Justice 4 Ronnie,” a
reference to the name Mr. Shumpert commonly used. A number of attendees
said in interviews that they could not imagine that the officer’s use
of deadly force was justified.
The
speakers, many of them prominent local ministers, said the Tupelo
police had a history of engaging in racially discriminatory practices.
Black residents said that racial profiling was a problem here, an
assertion that was also made in a “Cultural Diversity Assessment”
commissioned by the city and released in 2008.
Mr.
Shelton said the report examined the city’s government under a previous
administration, at a time when the Police Department was run by a
different chief. And he noted that he and other elected officials had
recently created a task force with the goal of encouraging peace and
communication between the races and avoiding the kind of conflagration
that engulfed cities like Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo.
James Hull, a pastor who hosts a local radio show, said it was “half-true” that “we’ve got our own Ferguson.” Like Ferguson, he said, there was a killing that he believed to be unjust. But unlike Ferguson, he said, the protest here would be peaceful.
Some,
like Doyce Deas, 71, pray that will be true. Ms. Deas, a former City
Council member, is one of a number of residents who have worked to help
the city live up to the example set in the 1960s by black and white
leaders who managed to guide Tupelo through school desegregation
peacefully and without triggering so-called white flight. It is part of
what locals call the “Tupelo Spirit,” local shorthand for a
civic-minded, racially tolerant culture that many here, even black
critics of the Police Department, believe has helped Tupelo attract
industry and set it apart from other Mississippi towns.
Continue reading the main story
Ms.
Deas, who is white, spoke as though some fragile, precious edifice
might crack. “I just don’t want to see our community torn apart,” she
said.
Mr.
Shumpert had been driving his friend Charles Foster’s car that Saturday
night. The two men played together on the local semipro football team,
the Lee County TiCats, and they were going to pick up a shirt that Mr. Foster wanted to wear to a team party.
Football
was Mr. Shumpert’s passion. He was a fast, agile, broad-shouldered man
who had little problem competing with players who were much younger than
him.
Mr.
Shumpert, who worked in construction, dreamed of being a coach, but his
dreams may have been hampered by a criminal record. In 2006, he pleaded
guilty to burglary and larceny here in Lee County, Miss. He was also
under indictment on a 2013 charge of theft by deception stemming from an
episode in Midland County, Tex. Tupelo officials said he had an
outstanding warrant.
Mr.
Foster said he was surprised when Mr. Shumpert told him he was going to
run away after being pulled over last month. Mr. Foster said they had
been driving the speed limit and otherwise obeying the law.
Mr.
Shelton said that according to the Police Department’s account, Mr.
Shumpert hid in the crawl space of a nearby home after running from the
car.
“My
understanding is that the canine was sent in to try to get Mr. Shumpert
out from underneath the home,” Mr. Shelton said. Then, he said, “Mr.
Shumpert essentially jumped out from the crawl space” and was soon on
top of the officer, “repeatedly punching him in the face.”
The mayor said the officer was on his back when he shot Mr. Shumpert four times.
Mr.
Shelton said he was unaware of any witnesses other than the officer,
whom he identified as Tyler Cook. On Friday, city officials released a
photo of what they said was Officer Cook about an hour after the
episode. It shows him with cuts on his nose, his face discolored.
City
officials would not release much other information about Officer Cook.
Mr. Shelton said he was unaware “of any blemish” on the officer’s
record, except for one episode in which he tackled a white teenager
during a burglary call, which turned out to be a house party, and broke
the youth’s tooth. Officer Cook, who has been placed on paid
administrative leave, could not be reached for comment.
Mr.
Shelton dismissed Mr. Moore, whose main law practice is based in
Grenada, Miss., roughly 90 miles from Tupelo, as an “outsider” who had
“come in with a clear agenda to do harm to the city.”
He
also said that the photos of Mr. Shumpert’s body that Mr. Moore has
shown to the public were taken after Mr. Shumpert had undergone a
surgery in an attempt to save his life, and after his autopsy. Mr.
Shelton said he had reviewed photos of the body taken the night of the
shooting and saw no evidence of the injuries that Mr. Moore says were
caused by the dog.
Mr. Moore, a former candidate for the State Senate, made headlines this year when he filed a lawsuit
arguing that the state flag, with its embedded Confederate banner,
“incites private citizens to commit acts of racial violence.”
Mr.
Moore provided The Times with Mr. Shumpert’s medical records from the
North Mississippi Medical Center, where he was taken after he was shot. A
“physical summary” of Mr. Shumpert written by a doctor notes, “There
was a gunshot wound to the right groin that separated the scrotum on the
left side and entered the upper thigh.”
Dr.
Hany Atallah, the chief of emergency medicine at Grady Memorial
Hospital in Atlanta, reviewed photographs of the body that Mr. Moore
provided to The Times. Because he had not viewed the body in person, Dr.
Atallah said his opinion could not be definitive. But he said the
wounds did not seem consistent with a dog attack.
The
wound in the groin, he said, seemed too linear, and devoid of tissue
damage, to have been caused by bites, which, he said in an email, “tend
to cause jagged, irregular wounds with multiple punctures.”
Mr. Moore said he had identified an eyewitness who would attest that the dog “attacked Mr. Shumpert in his groin.”
In
his lawsuit, Mr. Moore also claims that the dog “severely clawed Mr.
Shumpert on his back and inflicted other injuries and bruises,” and that
the officer punched him in the face and “kicked or stomped” his mouth,
knocking his teeth toward his throat.
Though
the photos Mr. Moore provided show what appear to be long, deep
lacerations on Mr. Shumpert’s back, the hospital records say there were
“no abrasions/lacerations noted on the back” on the night he was
admitted. They also note bruises on his bottom gums and a missing tooth,
and lacerations under one eye and the bridge of his nose.
On
Thursday afternoon, Mr. Moore stood on the steps of the Lee County
Justice Center in a suit and sunglasses, flanked by Mr. Shumpert’s
family members, to announce the $35 million lawsuit.
He
removed the glasses with a flourish, and looked into a bank of news
cameras. “Make no mistake about it,” he said. “I’m coming after you,
Tupelo.”
While some white residents here are worried about Mr. Moore’s tone, many African-Americans have welcomed it.
“I
think he had to come in here with that kind of message,” said Quiana
Bouldin, 38, a hairstylist at the A Plus Barbershop & Salon. “His
job is to make people think about what’s going on, and bring light to
the Police Department.”
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