By: John Fullinwider
The vigil for Botham Jean was held October 2nd in front of Dallas Police Headquarters, 1400 Botham Jean Blvd., organized by Davante Peters and Yafeuh Balogun, leaders of the Botham Jean Memorial Committee.
I am grateful to be with you today, to remember Botham Jean and to honor his life.
Mothers Against Police Brutality was founded by Collette Flanagan in 2013 after her unarmed son, Clinton Allen, was shot to death by a Dallas police officer. Clinton and Botham Jean share the same birthday, September 29, and were about the same age at death.
Botham was also unarmed when Dallas police officer Amber Guyger entered his apartment on September 6, 2018. She was in uniform, and she shot Botham to death with her service weapon. We rightfully denounce the injustice not only of his murder, but also of a city government that refuses to accept any responsibility when Dallas police officers kill a person.
Who hired Amber Guyger? Who trained, armed, promoted, and paid her right up to the hour she murdered an unarmed man sitting on the couch in his own apartment? Yet the City stonewalled the Jean family’s wrongful death lawsuit from day one until Dallas was dismissed from the case. Not one penny in restitution has been paid by the City of Dallas to Botham’s family. And this is not new for Dallas. The only other Dallas police officer convicted of murdering a Dallas resident is Darrell Cain, who murdered Santos Rodriguez more than half a century ago. This city never helped Santos’s family either.
On the day of Botham’s murder police in America killed at least four other people. That week, police in America killed at least 20 people.
By the end of the year, 2018, across the country, more than 1,000 had died at the hands of police. Altogether more than 15,000 people have been killed by police since 2013, the year Clinton Allen was killed.1
We are here today in solidarity with Botham’s family, to show them they are not alone in their grief. And they aren’t alone. Every statistic in that grim death toll is a person in full, like Botham, like Clinton, a person who is mourned by their family, friends, and community. And not only do we mourn, and tens of thousands of families across the country mourn, but heaven itself mourns these unjust killings. What did God say to Cain? “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”
We hear that brother’s cry, Abel’s cry for justice, down through the ages. The voice of our brother’s blood is crying to us from the ground. In the long run, we will change policing in America and force this nation to respect the human rights of every person. We take heart from the cry of our brother Abel, and our brother Botham Jean, and so many others. And we can take heart from each other, from the people who are standing here with us right now. Look around. We are people who work for justice. We stand in the legacy of freedom fighters throughout American history. We remember them today, as we remember Botham Jean, grateful for the lives they lived. Let’s re-dedicate ourselves to this struggle. Look around. Take heart. Stay with it.
1. Statistics are from: www.policedata.org.
John Fullinwider, co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality, is a longtime community educator and organizer in Dallas.
