Angelica Johnson is forced to recount the images and sounds of her son, Da’Quain Johnson, being attacked by a police K-9 dog and being shot three times by police last month.
“As it was livestreaming, my granddaughter was calling me to tell me that the dog was attacking him, and before I could find out who, my son was dead,” she said through tears at a press conference Friday. “My granddaughter watched all of this from beginning to end.”
In the month since the Feb. 18 shooting of the 32-year-old father by Grand Rapids, Michigan, police, Johnson remains skeptical of everything the police and local media have reported about her son’s death.
On Thursday, state police released a report and video clips that detail the police account of what happened that night. They say that he was fleeing police on a bike and then exited and went behind apartments and fell to the ground. A police dog was seen approaching him and then two officers soon followed. Officers say he was pointing a gun at them.
A gun was reportedly found near Johnson’s body, but his mother and the family’s attorneys question the validity of police accounts.
Civil rights attorneys Ben Crump and Ven Johnson shared a bystander’s video Friday that they say showed Johnson pinned facedown by police, with a K-9 biting him, when he was shot three times in the back.
“I still want to frame the issue in this manner. Where’s the video of the suspect, Da’Quain, pointing the gun at the officers?” said Crump, a co-counsel representing the family. “Where is that video? You [state police] released a lot of edited videos today in an attempt to reverse engineer the facts, but you didn’t release a video to shut us up, to have us go away, because you said there was a gun pointed in the face of your officers to justify this execution.”
Capital B has reached out to the Grand Rapids Police Department and the Michigan State Police.
The shooting in Grand Rapids is the latest in the debate about excessive use of force by police officers. The current standard for police use of force is the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision that says force must be “objectively reasonable,” and reasons that officers are “often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”
But Crump and co-counsel Johnson said the use of force in Grand Rapids was not justified, and they are calling for more accountability. They are waiting on an independent autopsy and have filed a Freedom of Information Act request for more video evidence and the police reports.
During Friday’s press conference, the attorneys and the family continued to push back against the police narrative of the night Da’Quain Johnson was shot.
“They initially spun a narrative that my son was still alive,” Angelica Johnson told reporters Friday. “The police chief explained to you about new high-state-of-the-art Tasers, but when asked why they weren’t used, he didn’t have an answer.”
She said she’s replayed the livestream too many times. Weeks later, she’s still left with the same questions.
“They say he was laying on the gun. He was pointing it. He was reaching for the gun,” she explained while trying to fight back tears. “We can clearly see that he had no opportunity to reach for a gun or anything else. But as I watched that movie over and over again, and I watched this dog attack my son over and over while two officers straddled his body, I’m still trying to figure out at what point he was a threat?”
There have also been conflicting accounts of whether Johnson was in possession of drugs.
Robert Womack, a member of the Kent County Board of Commissioners, said Thursday that a lot of local leadership has become quiet because of the narrative coming out from the media. Grand Rapids is the county seat of Kent County.
“Nobody wants to be associated with police officers who say that somebody found some drugs on somebody,” he continued. “Every life matters. No police officer should be the judge, jury …”
As Da’Quain’s mother pointed to family photos, she began to smile and wanted him to be remembered for what he meant to his family.
“Da’Quain loved to barbecue. He just loved to get together with family. This was when he lived in Georgia with me. He could burn,” she reminisced, breaking the somber mood. “His favorite thing — I didn’t get a chance to eat — he had just learned how to make turkey knuckles, and I was supposed to get some, and I didn’t get any but it’s OK.”
No matter what the police and bystander videos show of his last moments, it will never capture the fullness of his life, she reflected.
“He was compassionate. He was a wonderful father. He loved his kids dearly. He loved his siblings,” she said. “He was the type of person that, literally, he would give you the shirt off his back. If you called him, you knew he would be there. He wasn’t just my first born. He was my best friend.”