Rayshard Brooks’ widow Tomika Miller and other family members will address media on Monday morning, along with family attorneys L. Chris Stewart and Justin Miller.
A March for Justice is also scheduled, starting at the Richard B. Russell Federal Building and ending at the state Capitol.
Brooks was fatally shot by police in Atlanta on Friday night outside of a Wendy’s after police responded to a call about him being asleep in his car in the drive-thru lane. The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office ruled his death a homicide Sunday night, caused by two shots to the back.
In Minneapolis, at least seven police officers have resigned since the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day.
And in Kentucky, no-knock warrants such as the one used when police in Louisville crashed into Breonna Taylor’s apartment may be passing into history. The city has already banned them, a state lawmaker says she will offer a bill this week banning them statewide, and U.S. Sen Rand Paul, R-Ky, is pressing for a nationwide ban.
A closer look at some recent developments:
- As protests continued in Minneapolis, some police officers have quit while others are resigning, citing a lack of support from department and city leaders.
- Beyonce sent Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron a letter calling for the arrest of the officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s death.
- A California woman apologized for ‘disrespectful’ behavior after a viral video shows her threatening to call the police on a man who stenciled ‘Black Lives Matter’ on his property.
- Sen. Tim Scott said President Donald Trump was not aware of the significance of Juneteenth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when his team scheduled a rally for the same day.
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L.A. sheriff to provide update on hanging death of Robert Fuller
The Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva on Monday will discuss the death of Robert Fuller, 24, a Black man whose body was found Wednesday hanging from a tree near Palmdale City Hall. The Sheriff’s Department is leading the investigation and has said it is a possible suicide, which has drawn the ire of Fuller’s family and others in the community who want the state attorney general to take over the probe.
“I take my commitment to transparency very seriously,” Vallanueva tweeted. “As such I want to thank Attorney General Xavier Becerra for agreeing to monitor our investigation.”
Ten days earlier, the body of Malcolm Harsch, 38, was found hanging in Victorville, 50 miles east of Palmdale. San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Jodi Miller said no indication of foul play had been found.
Breonna Taylor’s legacy could be an end to no-knock warrants
Louisville’s ban on no-knock search warrants, the kind used in the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, may be the start of something bigger. State Rep. Attica Scott, D-Louisville, said she expects to prefile within the next week a bill to ban no-knock warrants in Kentucky. And U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has already said is filing a bill he’s calling the “Justice for Breonna Taylor Act” that effectively would end no-knock warrants in the U.S.
Police investigating a drug case obtained a warrant with a no-knock provision for Taylor’s apartment, though officials have said that officers knocked before crashing through the door. Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker has said he did not hear anyone announce that they were police, and fired at what he thought were intruders. Taylor was killed in the ensuing gunfight. No drugs were found.
– Matt Mencarini, Louisville Courier Journal
Mom of Black teen stopped for jaywalking in Tulsa: ‘It’s nonsense”
The mother of one of two Black teens involved in a confrontation with Tulsa police officers who accused them of jaywalking said the boys were walking down a back road where there was no sidewalk. Police have released footage of the June 4 incident on Facebook, saying the officers were members of a special Gang Unit and that the “stop occurred just outside of a complex in which there is a documented increase in criminal activity.” One teen was released, the other struggled with the officers and was arrested. An investigation of the stop is underway.
“It’s nonsense,” Tawanna Adkins told CNN, who said the boys were visiting a relative. “They weren’t jaywalking.”
Minneapolis police officers quit, resign amid George Floyd protests
At least seven Minneapolis police officers have resigned since widespread unrest began following the death of George Floyd last month, and more than half a dozen are in the process of leaving, department officials told The Star Tribune. Some officers said they were upset with Mayor Jacob Frey’s decision to abandon the Third Precinct station during the protests where demonstrators set the building on fire after officers left.
The department currently has about 850 officers, almost 40 short of the number authorized for this year, the newspaper reported.
LaFace Skincare CEO Lisa Alexander apologizes after viral video backlash
The woman in a video that gained national attention last week has apologized for confronting and threatening to call police on a Filipino man stenciling “Black Lives Matter” on his San Francisco property. Lisa Alexander, founder and CEO of LaFace Skincare, was later identified on social media. She issued an apology Sunday saying, “I should have minded my own business.”
“There are not enough words to describe how truly sorry I am for being disrespectful to him last Tuesday when I made the decision to question him about what he was doing in front of his home,” Alexander said in a statement.
The video shows Alexander and a man, later identified as Robert Larkin, asking James Juanillo whether he lives in the house before asserting that they know he doesn’t live there and is therefore breaking the law. Juanillo doesn’t answer the couple, but invites them to call the police. Juanillo told KGO-TV he believed the couple accused him of defacing private property because they didn’t think he belonged in the wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood.
Protests continue in Berlin, Milan against police brutality
Protests against police brutality continued abroad Sunday in the wake of George Floyd demonstrations across the U.S. In Berlin, demonstrators formed a human chain across the city in a message against racism, discrimination and social inequality. They were linked by colored ribbons, forming what organizers called a “ribbon of solidarity.”
In Milan, Italy, protesters scrawled ’’rapist” and “racist’’ in Italian on the statue of late Italian journalist Indro Montanelli on Saturday. Montanelli was a correspondent for a fascist newspaper in the 1930s and had a 12-year-old Eritrean while stationed there. Activist group Retestudentimilano said in an Instagram post that “ignoring or underestimating the seriousness of having before our eyes, in the center of Milan, a statue testifying to racist crimes denotes an obvious lack of historical and moral awareness.”
Protesters in California, New York seek justice for the Black LGBTQ community
Demonstrators in California and New York took to the streets on Sunday to honor and demand justice for Black queer and trans people who have died in police custody. In Los Angeles, thousands marched along a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, where an ‘All Black Lives Matter’ mural was painted in rainbow colors, the Los Angeles Times reported. The march, also called ‘All Black Lives Matter,’ was organized by Black leaders in the LGBTQ+ community.
Meanwhile, in New York, thousands gathered in the courtyard of the Brooklyn Museum and surrounding parkway Sunday for a silent march in support of Black transgender lives, NBC News reported. The protest comes after the killings of two Black trans women – Riah Milton in Ohio and Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells in Pennsylvania – in the last week, as well as Tony McDade, who was fatally shot by a Tallahassee police officer in May, Layleen Polanco, who died while in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, and Nina Pop, who was stabbed to death in Missouri in May.
“Show them what community sounds like! This is what community sounds like,” the protesters, clad in white, chanted as they walked, according to Twitter posts.
Beyonce urges arrest of police officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s death
More than three months after Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her Kentucky apartment by Louisville Metro Police officers, Beyonce is calling on the state to “take swift and decisive action in charging the officers.” In a letter addressed to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron and shared on her website, Beyonce called for criminal charges to be brought against LMPD Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison, and for the AG to “commit to transparency” during the investigation and prosecution processes.
“Three months have passed – and Breonna Taylor’s family still waits for justice,” Beyonce wrote. “Ms. Taylor’s family has not been able to process and grieve. Instead, they have been working tirelessly to rally the support of friends, their community, and the country to obtain justice for Breonna.”
– Hannah Yasharoff and Sarah Ladd, USA TODAY
A Michigan case similar to Floyd’s death may reopen six years later
Six years after his death, the family of McKenzie Cochran — a Ferndale, Michigan, man who died when security officers pinned him to the floor at a mall — may get the justice they have long been seeking in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Like Floyd, Cochran died at the hands of white security officers who held him face down on a mall floor, including one who said: “If you can talk, you can breathe.”
Cochran died that day. The autopsy said the cause was compression asphyxiation. No charges were filed, his death ruled an accident. On Friday, Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper, facing mounting pressure from protesters amid a thundering Black Lives Matter movement, asked the state Attorney General’s Office to review the case.
– Tresa Baldas, Detroit Free Press
Sen. Tim Scott: Trump didn’t know the significance of Tulsa and Juneteenth
President Donald Trump was unfamiliar with the significance of June 19 when his campaign scheduled a rally for that date in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but rescheduled the event when he learned the day know as Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the U.S., according to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.
“I’m thankful that he moved it,” Scott – the only African-American Republican in the Senate and one of only three Black senators in total – said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday. “The president moving the date by a day once he was informed on what Juneteenth was, that was a good decision on his part.” Coupled with the significance of the date, the choice of Tulsa – where a white mob killed hundreds in 1921 as it burned and looted an affluent Black neighborhood – was decried by many as racially insensitive amid nationwide protests against discrimination.
– William Cummings, USA TODAY
More on protests:
Contributing: The Associated Press
