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makes me sympathize with Ma'Khia a lot more.
First of all, she was in her (foster) home. And these 2 girls, older former foster sisters, at least one of whom is an enemy/Ma'Khia doesn't get along with, show up at the house to visit the foster mom for her bday. Foster mom was not home (yet), and they instead (predictably) get into it, and specifically start bitching at Ma'Khia about the state of the house, calling her dirty, telling her to clean, and something to the effect of 'their mom' doesn't like the house dirty etc. Yes it was a silly reason to get that violent but that's the kinda small shit teenagers will fight over, and I view the fight as instigated by these other girls. As in, Ma'Khia was just at home minding her biz and these other girls show up and start bullying her.
Next thing is, there's no footage (that we know of) of what happened in that house before they took it outside. The main enemy girl could've attacked Ma'Khia first for all we know or been stomping or choking her out etc. But whatever went down inside there, enemy girl was in good enough condition to run outside first (while girl in the pink was on the phone calling the foster mom to come home immed) and Ma'Khia was pushed to the point of grabbing a knife to defend herself. If Ma'Khia is the one who called the police (I'm starting to wonder whether it was the girl in pink instead), perhaps this is when she did it. And yes it's hard to consider the other girls the initial aggressors from these videos, especially with Ma'Khia running out with the knife and stating she wanted to stab tf out of enemy girl. But I'm like, these girls instigated with some fucking hurtful you're a dirty bitch and don't belong in our mother's house type talk, and we also don't know what Ma'Khia had even been through in her life to that point already to even end up in foster care (eg. maybe she'd been abused). And, again, we don't know what they physically did to Ma'Khia to push her to the point of blacking out, and now we'll probably never truly know bc Ma'Khia's dead and as if the other girls are going to say anything that implicates themselves.
Last thing is, I read that cop has only been on the job a short while and he does look poorly trained. I thought they learn all types of manouveurs to disarm people in situations like this?? If he had simply announced himself or even did the whole "Drop your weapon!" thing I bet Ma'Khia and enemy girl would have totally raised their hands up and complied. All he needed to do was take control and de-escalate and it's like you can watch him make a conscious choice NOT to do that. Like, EVEN IF he'd announced himself and asked her to drop her weapon and she was too blacked out to hear/care, he was close enough when she and enemy girl were tussling on the ground that he could have restrained her, grabbed her arm with the knife etc... moves I'm not familiar with but I know exist and police get trained on. He also had another opportunity when Ma'Khia got up and ran to the other girl; her swinging was mad wide and directionless. He could have even chased her the few feet and grabbed her arm/disarmed her or tackled her then. Like I can't believe we see video of cops tackling teens at pool parties and whatever else, but the *one* scenario where it would have made sense to tackle, restrain, and disarm her and all he thought to do was shoot. He was already reaching for his gun in those few seconds where he had good opportunities to disarm.
Smh. Such and unnecessary death.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/22/us/ohio-columbus-makhia-bryant-police-shooting/index.html
Ma'Khia Bryant argued about housekeeping before fatal police shooting, foster parent says
By Ray Sanchez, Mark Morales and Jason Carroll, CNN
Updated 9:35 PM ET, Thu April 22, 2021
Police officer shot and killed teen girl holding a knife, bodycam video shows
(CNN)Ma'Khia Bryant and two other young women argued over a messy house and unmade bed before a fight that ended with the fatal police shooting shooting of the Black teenager, the woman who cared for Ma'Khia in foster care said Thursday.
Angela Moore said two of her former foster children had come to her Columbus, Ohio, home Tuesday to celebrate her birthday when the young women and Ma'Khia bickered over housekeeping.
"It was over keeping the house clean," Moore said. "The older one told them to clean up the house because 'Mom doesn't like the house dirty,'" Moore recalled being told after she arrived home from work. "So that's how it all started."
Officials in Columbus have released body camera video of Tuesday's shooting -- during which Ma'Khia lunges at another young woman with a knife outside the house -- and urged residents to await the facts in the investigation.
Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Moore relayed for CNN the story she said she was told by one of the girls in the house at the time.
"You're not the guardian of me," Bryant replied, according to the story Moore said she was told.
"They argue all the time," Moore recalled, "but I never thought it would escalate like that."
Moore said she received a frantic call from one of the former foster children, who is seen in police body camera footage wearing pink and recoiling as Ma'Khia lunges at her with a shimmering knife.
"Mom, get home. Where are you? They're going crazy," Moore said the young woman told her. "She said they shot Ma'Kiah and I said, 'Huh?' It was just crazy."
Moore said she started praying. Soon she started getting text messages from people saying, "I'm sorry." When she got home, a police officer told her Ma'Khia had died.
"I never in my worst nightmare would have thought it would ever come to this," she said.
Outside Moore's home on Legion Lane, votive candles stretched onto the sidewalk Thursday. Balloons and flowers draped the side of a tree. Mourners paid their respects to Ma'Kiah, who, according to Moore, had been living at the house for only a couple of months.
"She was fun," Moore said of her young charge. "She liked to dance. She did chores around the house."
Ma'Khia's mother says 'beautiful baby' has been 'taken from me'
Ma'Khia's cousins remembered her as "a good student, a good person" whose life was unnecessarily cut short by "disproportionate and unjustified use of force."
"As a family we are all saddened by the tragic and unnecessary death of Ma'Khia," cousins Don Bryant and Deja Torrence said in a public appeal for justice. "She was loved by many. ... We want to remind everyone Ma'Khia was only a 16 year old teenage girl."
Ma'Khia's mother, Paula, in an interview Thursday said her "beautiful baby" has been "taken from me."
"I love God and I'm just going to put it in God's hands right now," Bryant said when asked about accountability for her daughter's death at the hands of police. "That's all I know how to do."
Bryant recalled a loving, funny and humble child who enjoyed music, cooking and seeing others laugh. She had recently made honor roll in high school, her mother told CNN on Thursday, and Ma'Khia's TikTok videos on makeup and styling hair were widely shared.
"I want the world to know that Ma'Khia was beautiful," Bryant said.
"She had a sweet little voice. Oh my gosh, she was just so talented. She was ... on the path to going many places, definitely."
The shooting occurred Tuesday afternoon, about 30 minutes before a guilty verdict was delivered in the killing of George Floyd. A jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of all three charges against him.
"As we breathed a collective sigh of relief today, a community in Columbus felt the sting of another police shooting," Floyd family attorney Ben Crump tweeted.
The Columbus Board of Education, in a statement, lamented the deaths of Ma'Khia and Tre Von Dickson, a public school student killed by gun violence on Tuesday.
"While the outcome of the Derek Chauvin trial is now one demonstration that the 'system' can be held accountable, it certainly does not demonstrate that the system has been corrected or that there is true justice," board members said in a statement.
Ma'Khia enrolled at Independence High School in February. Franklin County Children's Services said she was a foster child in the county's care.
"We are tired of hearing about our students who are losing their lives because of community violence and these tragedies that seem like they're never ending," Columbus City Schools Superintendent Talisa Dixon said.
City and police officials almost immediately released video footage of the controversial shooting at a time when police use of force is under national scrutiny. In February, former Columbus police officer Adam Coy was indicted on charges related to the fatal shooting of Andre Hill, a 47-year-old Black man.
"We don't yet have all of the facts but we do know that a 16-year-old girl, a child of this community, tragically died last night," Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther told reporters on Wednesday.
"Bottom line: Did Ma'Khia Bryant need to die yesterday?" he added. "How did we get here? This is a failure on the part of our community. Some are guilty but all of us are responsible."
Ginther said state investigators will determine "if the officer involved was wrong, and if he was we will hold him accountable."
Police identified the officer who fired the shots as Nicholas Reardon, who was hired in December 2019. The officer is off street duty pending an investigation.
Reardon served in the Ohio National Guard since August 2015, according to records. He is a staff sergeant assigned to the 121st Security Forces Squadron, Ohio Air National Guard, which is part of the 121st Air Refueling Wing.
Police attempt to revive teen after shooting
In a series of clips from police body camera video, Ma'Khia is seen holding a knife during a tussle with a young woman. An officer arrived at the scene and opened fire when the girl appeared to attempt to stab a second young woman.
"She's a ---- kid," a man at the scene tells the officer after four shots were fired. "Damn, are you stupid?"
Ma'Khia fell to the ground, the knife by her side.
"She came at her with a knife," the officer who fired his weapon is heard saying.
The situation unfolded rapidly, according to clips from the body cameras of three officers on the street. Ma'Khia was holding a knife in her right hand and charged the young woman dressed in pink -- who turned to her side as the teen appeared to attempt to stab her. That's when the shots were fired.
Officers attempted lifesaving measures "almost immediately," said interim Police Chief Michael Woods, who said the first medic was on scene in six minutes.
In the video, one officer asked, "Where is she hit?" The officer started lifesaving measures. "Stay with us," he told the girl and asked bystanders her name.
"Stay with us, Ma'Khia," he implored.
Bureau of Criminal Investigation looking into shooting
Officials urged the community to wait for all the facts to come out.
If an officer is "faced with someone employing deadly force, deadly force can be the response," Woods told reporters.
Ginther said the Bureau of Criminal Investigation will look into the actions of the officer.
"I understand the outrage and the emotion about this incident," Department of Public Safety Ned Pettus Jr. said at a news conference. "The video shows there is more to this. It requires us to pause."
A pair of CNN law enforcement analysts defended the officer's use of force as reasonable.
"(If) you don't shoot, the one young lady -- she stabs the other one and she dies," Charles Ramsey, a former Philadelphia police commissioner, said of the officer's actions. "But he had no other alternative, in my mind, other than to take some action because of what was going on. The young lady who was shot was clearly the aggressor in this case."
Anthony Barksdale, a former Baltimore City deputy police commissioner, told CNN the officer used lethal force when another person "was in clear and imminent danger of being stabbed."
"The officer used his service weapon to stop the threat," he said. "This unfortunate tragic incident was justified from a policing perspective. ... I am saying that, per training, the officer did his job and we need to start looking at each incident as its own incident."
Head of police union offers condolences
The president of the police union offered condolences to Ma'Khia's family.
"It's traumatic on everyone and we understand that," Keith Ferrell, president of the Capitol City Lodge number 9, said in a video, according to CNN affiliate WSYX.
"We have all seen the videos that have been released by the city now in the act of full transparency and we support that." Ferrell added, "What we've seen in a lot of circumstances and heard from the call, the 911 calls, we can see what we think has unfolded. But there is more to look at. There will be an independent investigation done that will get those answers. But we can speak on what we know now that has been released by the City of Columbus. We can certainly see that lives were at stake."
Ferrell said officers must make split-second decisions to save lives.
"We have a duty to protect the public and ourselves, certainly, the public," he said. "These are the kind of decisions officers are forced to make every day, and with this transparency, the public can see that. As unfortunate as it is, we do not know potentially how many lives could have been lost in addition or people seriously injured."
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called Ma'Khia's death a "horrible, horrible tragedy" and praised Ginther for releasing videos of the incident.
"We should have enough compassion to worry about every child who is shot in our cities," DeWine said at a briefing. "And we should not accept it."
CNN's Francesca Hoffman, Evan Simko-Bednarski, Amir Vera, Artemis Moshtaghian, Anna Sturla, Rob Frehse, Elizabeth Joseph, Kristina Sgueglia, Melissa Alonso, Madeline Holcombe and Chuck Johnston contributed to this report.
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