Tire Nichols’ mother, the police chief are women on two sides of the tragedy

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Tire Nichols’ mother was a few feet away from her son, but she couldn’t hear his cries of anguish.

Battered and bruised, struggling to survive, Nichols screamed as five Memphis Police Department officers punched, kicked and kicked him after a Jan. 7 traffic stop.

Nichols, 29, who lived with his mother and stepfather, ran from police after he was pulled over, dragged from his car and shot with a stun gun. Caught minutes later outside their home and savagely beaten by five officers, he shouted: “Mum! Mother!”

Moments later, police knocked on the mother’s door, but not to alert RowVaughn Wells that her son had been savagely beaten, according to Rodney Wells, her husband and Nichols’ stepfather. They said Nichols was arrested for driving under the influence and taken to the hospital. The police said they couldn’t go to the hospital because their son was under arrest.

Memphis Police Director Cereyln “CJ” Davis, herself a mother, didn’t learn what her officers had done to Nichols until later. The lack of police supervisors at the scene would be noted by many after Nichols’ death on January 10.

The fact that no one felt compelled to complete it by the next day raised questions about her department’s culture that she would have to answer in the coming days, even if she asked them herself.

“There were failures in terms of who should have helped, who should have warned, who went to the mother’s house, how they communicated,” Davis told The Associated Press in a Jan. 27 interview. “Why was the boss notified at 4 in the morning and the accident happened at 8 the night before?”

That same time, at 4 a.m., RowVaughn Wells received a call from a doctor at the hospital where he was being treated, Rodney Wells said. The doctor told them to go to the hospital immediately.

When he got there, he found Nichols on life support. When Wells first saw his son’s mangled body, the Davis Police Department was doing damage control.

The next few hours and days in Memphis would set the tone for America’s latest version of police brutality, with RowVaughn Wells and Cerelyn Davis on opposite sides of the same tragedy. Their lives would change, in radically different ways.

Wells and his family cried and cried and cried for Tire Nichols, the happy-go-lucky skateboarder and amateur photographer who arrived in Memphis from California about a year ago. In the end, she was left with the hope that her son’s fate might mean something, taking his place, as she did for the long line of young black men who died at the hands of the police.

Davis, the first black woman to lead the Memphis Police Department, faced heavy criticism. As she and other city officials came to terms with what happened, they gradually took steps to hold the officers accountable, share the horror of the case with the public and try to minimize the chance that the incident would spark riots in Memphis and beyond.

But she will be invoked in vivid terms at Nichols’ funeral as a beneficiary of the advances the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was fighting for in Memphis when he was shot more than half a century earlier.

At 6:03 a.m. on Jan. 8, the police department posted a vague statement on social media saying Nichols had two “run-ins” with police. “He complained of difficulty breathing, at which point an ambulance was called,” the statement said.

Wells knew it was better then. He had seen him bruised, swollen, hooked up to machines.

The Memphis Fire Department later revealed that it took 27 minutes from the time EMS arrived on the scene to the time an ambulance took him to the hospital.

“When I walked into that hospital room, my son was already dead,” Wells said during a Jan. 23 news conference.

Doubts about the police department’s initial bill grew. A photo of a flat tire in the hospital was shared in the press. Activists questioned the department’s account and demanded the release of a video of the arrest.

Nichols’ family hired attorney Ben Crump, known for representing the families of other people killed by police, including George Floyd. Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020 led to nationwide protests and increased calls for police reform.

Wells cried during the Jan. 17 memorial service for her son, but did not want to speak publicly until later.

Gradually, a fuller portrait of Nichols emerged. He had lived with his mother and stepfather and boxed at FedEx with Rodney Wells. He had two brothers, a sister and a 4-year-old boy. He was an amateur photographer who loved sunsets and skateboarding.

Tire had his mother’s name tattooed on his arm.

“This man walked into a room and everybody loved him,” said Angelina Paxton, a friend who traveled from California for work.

That same day, Memphis officials pledged to release video of the attack.

The five officers were fired on January 20 after an internal police investigation found violations of police rules, including excessive use of force and a lack of intervention and assistance.

In a statement, Davis called their actions “outrageous.”

The family met with authorities to view the video – gruesome footage RowVaughn Wells said he hasn’t been able to watch since that meeting. He later warned parents to avoid showing it to their children.

Wells said she was at her home at the time of the beating, waiting for Tire to come home and give her the usual cheery “Hello Parents!” greeting.

“For a mother to know that their child was calling out to them in need and I wasn’t there for them, you know how I feel right now?” Wells told the media during a Jan. 27 press conference.

“I wasn’t there for my son. I was telling someone that I had severe stomach pain earlier, I didn’t know what happened,” she said. “But once I found out what happened, that was the pain my son felt.”

He also told how a normal day turned into a horrible one.

Tire had seen her take out a few chicks on the day of her arrest before she left the house around 3 p.m. to photograph the sunset in a suburban park, she said.

“He said, ‘Mom, are you cooking chicken tonight?’ I said yes.”

“He said, ‘How do you cook it?’

In a late-night video statement released Jan. 25, Davis said he met with the Nichols family and offered his condolences. He vowed to continue investigating the actions of other officers.

“I’m a mother, I’m a caring human being who wants the best for all of us,” Davis said. “This is not just a professional failure. This is a failure of basic humanity.

Officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith were indicted the next day, 19 days after Nichols’ arrest. It’s a time frame that Crump said should be a “blueprint” for other police agencies facing similar situations to follow.

Asked about the allegations, Rodney Wells told the AP the family is “fine.”

He also said his wife thought Davis was doing an “excellent” job.

Friday, January 27th was the day Memphis and the nation had been waiting for: the release of the video.

Hours before he was released from the city, Davis told the AP that the footage failed to show what remains a mystery: why Nichols was stopped in the first place.

Officers were “already amped up, about 10,” he said, when the video began. Members of the crime team known as the Scorpion unit were “aggressive, loud, used foul language and probably frightened Mr Nichols from the start”.

“We don’t know what happened,” Davis said. “All we know is that the force used in this situation was excessive.”

Rodney Wells, Davis and community leaders called for the protests to be peaceful in honor of King’s belief in nonviolent action.

Protesters blocked an interstate bridge, but there was no violence. No material damage. No arrests.

Davis disbanded the Scorpion unit on Jan. 28 after “listening carefully” to the Nichols family, community leaders and other squad officers.

Crump said the Nichols family felt the move was “appropriate and proportionate to the tragic death of Tire Nichols.”

He also called it “a decent and fair decision for all the citizens of Memphis.”

Tire Nichols was buried on February 1st. The freeze-delayed funeral at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church featured a rousing choir, a eulogy from the Rev. Al Sharpton and a visit from Vice President Kamala Harris.

Also present were relatives of Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Botham Jean, Jalen Randle and Floyd, black people who were also killed by police.

Harris praised Nichols’ parents for their extraordinary strength, courage and grace throughout the ordeal.

In his eulogy, Sharpton said he took his daughter Ashley early that morning to the site of the former Lorraine Motel, a black-owned business where King was killed on April 4, 1968. The motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

Sharpton noted that the civil rights movement led by King opened the door to black inner-city workers in Memphis and elsewhere, and said the five black officers insulted King’s legacy by beating Tiro to death.

Sharpton called the officers and Davis, reminding them of those who marched, went to jail and died while fighting for racial equality.

“You didn’t go to the police station alone. The police chief did not come alone,” he said.

Despite her pain, RowVaughn Wells also spoke out. Speaking from the pulpit in the large church, she wiped away tears and said she believed her son “was sent here on a mission by God”.

“And I think his mission is over now. He was taken home.”

Someone in the audience shouted that Nichols was going to change the world.

“Yes,” said her mother, nodding. “YES.”

And then, once again, he praised Davis for acting quickly.