“They had reduced him to mush”. With her raw pain, the mother of Tyre Nichols stirred America, recounting the death of her son “beaten to death” according to her by Memphis police officers.
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Behind a loud megaphone, RowVaughn Wells warned the people of this large city in Tennessee, in the southern United States, on Thursday evening that the video of the drama, which is due to be released on Friday evening, will be “horrifying”.
She did not see it, unlike her husband. But she saw with her own eyes the abuse suffered by her son when she visited him in the hospital, a few hours after his beating.
“He had bruises all over, his head was swollen like a watermelon, his neck was an open sore from being so swollen,” she described in a poignant interview aired Friday by CNN. “When I saw that, I understood that he was dead”.
“They had reduced him to a pulp.”
credit: family of Tire Nichols
“Where has their humanity gone? They beat my son like a pinata,” she continued, referring to the decorated object children blow up to collect candy and toys at birthday parties, a tradition imported from Mexico.
Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old African-American, was hospitalized on January 7 after a “confrontation” with police who wanted to arrest him for a simple traffic violation. He died three days later.
On Thursday, five agents, themselves African-Americans, were charged with murder and imprisoned. Four of them were later released on bail.
The circumstances of the tragedy are not yet known, but RowVaughn Wells has been repeating it for several days, his “son was good”.
“He liked to skateboard”, “went out every evening to watch the sunset and take pictures”, “had a tattoo with my name on his arm”, she indicated during a conference of press at the beginning of the week.
“Does this sound like someone who disrespects the police?”
Admitting not to understand everything yet, she then confided between two sobs: “All I know is that my son Tire is no longer with me”.
Despite her distress, she hopes that her city, or any other, will not go up in flames. “When the video comes out, it will be horrible, but I want you to demonstrate peacefully,” she told the crowd paying tribute to her son on Thursday evening.
“I don’t want you to burn the cities, to devastate the streets, because that’s not what my son would have wanted,” she insisted, “…and because we have to live there .”
As for the officers, this grieving mother assured CNN to “pity” them. “They shame their family, the African-American community,” she said.