Vol. 80/No. 2 January 18, 2016
NJ: ‘The autopsy showed my
son’s death was homicide’
On Dec. 30, 2014, Reid was the passenger in a car stopped by Bridgeton cops Braheme Days and Roger Worley, allegedly for not making a complete stop at a stop sign. What happened next was captured on the cops’ car videocam, which was released after public pressure and news media demands.
Days says he sees a gun in the glove compartment and reaches in and takes it. Reid says he is going to get out and lay on the ground. The cops tell him to stay in the car. Reid gets out with his hands in the air and the cops shoot him over and over. A Cumberland County grand jury declined to file criminal charges against the two officers in August.
Two months earlier county officials paid Reid’s family $340,000 to settle a lawsuit he filed after he was beaten in the county jail in 2009. The family is suing the city of Bridgeton for his killing.
Protesters held a rally at the residential intersection where Reid was killed, marked by a small roadside memorial. Then participants marched to the Cumberland County Jail. A busload from Newark organized by the Reid family and the People’s Organization for Progress joined the family, neighbors and members of the National Awareness Alliance in Salem County.
Reid’s wife, Lawanda Reid, and her mother Hazel Hartsfield, joined the protest. He had visited Hartsfield an hour before being shot down. “Never did I think I wouldn’t see him again when he walked out the door that night,” she told fellow protesters.
“The system is crooked,” said Cecile Hepburn, grandmother of Kashad Ashford, who was shot by Rutherford cops in September 2014. “We can get no justice in our children’s deaths.” Ashford’s mother, Regina Ashford, also marched.
A few hours before the rally a grand jury in Cleveland announced that no charges would be filed against the cops who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice there in November 2014. Marchers chanted his name and the names of others killed by police, including Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald and Michael Brown, along with those of Ashford and Reid.
“I will continue to protest to keep Jerame’s spirit alive,” Sheila Reid told the crowd, and will keep on marching “until justice is achieved — by any means necessary.”
Related articles:
Chicago actions continue against killings by cops
‘Arrest cops who shot down student, neighbor!’
UK gov’t moves to arm more cops, let them ‘shoot to kill’
Protests demand charges against Paradise cop
Hawa Bah: ‘Join fight against NY police killing of my son’
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