His body was released to her two weeks later. "That was for me to confirm if that was my child or not," she said. Instead they showed her pictures of her his shoe and a tattoo on his arm. Shepard had been shot in the head, and police would not allow her to see his body. "I turned around and was running lights and everything trying to get out there," she said. She works as a home health aide and was driving to her last client that afternoon when friends of her son began calling to say he had been shot by police. Coy, who was fired, has been indicted and is awaiting trial.Ī constant wounding is how Pearson describes the last 10 years. "It's like a deep wound, constantly getting cut," said Alvon Williams, whose brother, Andre Hill, was shot and killed by Columbus police officer Adam Coy in December. But for families who have endured similar losses, especially those who have not reached such a resolution, their conflicting emotions are not so easily parsed. The conviction on Tuesday of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd was widely hailed as a just result for an egregious display of police brutality. "The case was gone just as quick as his life." A constant wounding "It was just over and done with," his mother said.
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In short order, only his friends and family would continue to say his name. Obbie Shepard would never become a Twitter hashtag. The officers who chased Shepard that day were not indicted and were cleared by the division of any procedural wrongdoing. Police maintained that Shepard shot at them first, an assertion his mother still disputes. There was a brief public outcry in the South Side neighborhood where he died, but nothing close to the sustained protests that flared in Ferguson in 2014 or rippled across the U.S. No bystander video ever surfaced and went viral. More: Here are the names of people killed in police shootings in ColumbusĪt the time Shepard died, Columbus police did not wear body cameras.
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He died five years before Tyre King and Henry Green were killed by Columbus police, three years before the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and six months before the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, a case that would go on to inspire the Black Lives Matter movement. Nine years before George Floyd stopped breathing beneath the knee of a Minnesota police officer, Phyllis Pearson's son was shot to death by Columbus police in what started as a complaint about a stolen bicycle.