JACKSON, Miss. (Dispatches) — An 11-year-old was shot in the chest by police in the U.S. after he made a 911 call asking for help, his family said.
Aderrien Murry spent five days in hospital with a collapsed lung, lacerated liver, and fractured ribs after being rushed to hospital after an officer shot him in the chest early on Saturday, the family’s lawyer Carlos Moore said.
His mother Nakala asked him to call police at about 4 a.m. when she felt threatened when a former partner turned up at their home in Indianola, Mississippi, Moore said.
When two police officers arrived one kicked the front door before his mother opened it, he said.
She told them the intruder had left the home but three children were inside, he added.
Moore said an officer shouted into the home and said anyone inside should come out with their hands up.
He said Aderrien walked into the living room with nothing in his hands, and was shot in the chest.
Murry said: “His words were: ‘Why did he shoot me? What did I do?’ and he started crying. This cannot keep happening. This is not OK.”
The family is demanding the police officer be dismissed and charged with aggravated assault and have demanded bodycam of the incident is released.
Murry said her son is “blessed” to be alive but he does not understand why a police officer shot him.
The officer involved has been placed on leave as the shooting is investigated.
The incident is the latest in a string of police shootings of unarmed black people in America.
It came as the Americans began to mark the third anniversary of the murder of George Floyd who was choked to death by a white police officer.
On Thursday, Minneapolis residents gathered at a makeshift Floyd memorial, with signs that said “Say their names” - a phrase coined to call attention to systemic racism in the United States.
The murder looked to many observers like the catalyst needed for a nationwide reckoning on racism in policing.
For more than nine minutes, a white officer pressed his knee to the neck of Floyd, a Black man, who gasped, “I can’t breathe,” echoing Eric Garner’s last words in 2014. Video footage of Floyd’s May 25, 2020, murder was so agonizing to watch tha
demands for change came from across the country.
But in the midst of the deadly coronavirus pandemic, economic uncertainty and a divisive U.S. presidential election, 2020 ended without the kind of major police reforms that many hoped, and others feared, would come. Then, 2021 and 2022 also failed to yield much progress.
Now, three years since Floyd’s murder, proponents of federal actions — such as banning chokeholds and changing the so-called qualified immunity protections for law enforcement — still await meaningful signs of change. The beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police officers in early January underscored just how long it could take.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts, said during a recent press conference convened by a Black Lives Matter collective that she sees no evidence of a “racial reckoning.”
Around the world, protests against racial violence and police brutality erupted after Floyd’s murder, reigniting the Black Lives Matter movement. Videos circulated on social media of U.S. police using tear gas and less-lethal munitions like rubber bullets, fueling calls for accountability, which so far has largely come in the form of civil settlements.
New York City found 146 officers had committed misconduct at protests, including one officer who drove a car into protesters. Independent reviews in Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Los Angeles also found those departments had mishandled their responses.