Dear Friends: It took me a long time as I agonized to finally compose a letter to my local newspaper, the Loveland Herald-Reporter, about the killing of Tyre Nichols, who died on January 10 from a lethal beating by police on January 7, 2023. As a relative of Holocaust victims and survivors, I am only too aware of the consequences of allowing monstrosities to go unchecked. My awareness of violations of our brothers and sisters of color reaches back to lynchings and the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, whose violated body was finally extracted from the Tallahatchie River.
I have worked and mourned for the democracy we brag about while we deny it to millions, including the peoples who first settled the “Americas” over 20,000 years ago.
As a driver for 63 years, rarely have I been stopped for minor traffic or tail-light violations. Whenever I have been stopped, I showed my license, and the officers politely explained my error to me, and gave me advice on improving my driving. I wish this good treatment would be extended to all drivers, regardless of race, color, sexuality, age, ethnicity, physical handicaps, or English-speaking ability.
I am outraged and saddened by the killing of Tyre Nichols, a Black FedEx driver, loving father of a four-year-old son, and member of a close-knit family. I have seen videos of his amazing skate-boarding acrobatics.
TV broadcasts have shown recordings of Nichols’s killing. When stopped by police, he showed them his driver’s license and asked, “What did I do?” Rather than answer that reasonable question, the officers cursed him, roughly yanked him out of his vehicle and onto the ground, handcuffed him behind his back, and proceeded to repeatedly tear gas, beat, punch, and kick him – as he cried out for his mom. When Nichols managed to run away briefly, the police quickly caught up with him and beat him unconscious. Ambulance personnel waited a long time to take him to the hospital, where he died three days later.
I have viewed this horror over and over, unable to make any sense out of it. The Black community, joined by diverse concerned citizens, demonstrated against this monstrous miscarriage of justice, as they have for many brothers and sisters for so many decades.
This is not the America I pray I can someday believe in.
– Deborah Stucklen, Fort Collins Friends Meeting (IMYM)