GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (Dispatches) -- Demonstrators demanding an end to police brutality and racial discrimination have staged another protest march in Grand Rapids, Michigan, following the police killing of Patrick Lyoya.
The protest held on Saturday marked the 5th fifth consecutive day of marches following the release of a video showing the shooting death of Lyola, a Black man, at the hands of a white police officer.
Lyoya was on his stomach when he was shot in the head by a police officer after a brief struggle.
The 26-year-old Congolese refugee was killed during a traffic stop by the unidentified officer who has not been charged and is currently on paid leave while investigations are being carried out.
Video footage from the incident on April 4 shows Lyoya getting shot in his head while attempting to stop the officer from using his Taser on him after a confrontation following the traffic check.
On Thursday, Lyoya’s family demanded that Michigan’s city officials and law enforcement authorities publicly name the officer who shot Patrick, dismiss him from working in the police force and file criminal charges against him.
The grief-stricken parents of the Black man have described their son’s death as an “execution”.
“I didn’t believe that … there’s a genocide in this country,” said his father, Peter Lyoya, on Thursday through an interpreter. “I didn’t know that here in America, there can be execution-style … to be killed by the police officer.”
The Lyoya family came to the U.S. fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014. Patrick, a factory worker, was the eldest of six children and had two young daughters.
“[It] made me cry to see my son killed by a police officer for a small mistake,” said Peter Lyoya. “My heart was really broken … My life was Patrick, my son. I was thinking Patrick will take my place. And to see that my son was killed like an animal by this police officer.”
Grand Rapids is a small city of about 200,000 people located about 150 miles (240 kilometers)

northwest of Detroit, where like many places in the U.S. the police have faced criticism over the use of excessive force, particularly against Black people, who make up 18% of the population.
At the news conference inside Renaissance Church of God in Christ in Grand Rapids, Lyoya’s parents explained that they’d sought asylum in the U.S. looking for safety after years of civil unrest and violence at home in eastern Congo.
“They told us that in America, there’s peace, there’s safety, you’re not going to see killing any more, that it was basically a safe haven,” his mother, Dorcas Lyoya, told the Free Press through a translator. “What is so surprising … [the man] supposed to be protecting us is the one who shot my son.
“That was my beloved son. You know how you love your firstborn son,” she said.
“The video shows us that this is as his mother and father have said – an execution. And there is no way to spin it or justify,” said Ben Crump, a prominent civil rights lawyer who has represented several victims of police violence, as Patrick’s parents wept. “It is an unjustifiable use of deadly force because the police escalated a traffic stop into an execution.”
“We are condemning Russian soldiers for shooting civilians in Ukraine in the back of the head,” Crump said. “Why aren’t we condemning police officers here in the United States of America shooting Black civilians in the back of the head? If it’s wrong in Ukraine … it’s wrong in Grand Rapids, Michigan.”
African American writer and journalist Abayomi Azikiwe said the unjust U.S. government system was to blame for the killing.
The system “must be overthrown to achieve justice for African Americans,” he said.
This comes after the conviction of three white men for shooting dead unarmed Black man Ahmaud Arbery in February in the U.S. state of Georgia.
On February 23, 25-year-old Arbery was shot dead in the small coastal town of Brunswick, Georgia. The incident captured on video went viral on social media.
“This is a pattern that’s been going on for many years in the United States,” said Azikiwe, editor at the Pan-African News Wire.
U.S. President Joe Biden, who rose to power vowing to bring justice for the Blacks, has confessed to the government’s need for “hard work”.