Tyre Nichols' mom, chief: Women on two sides of a tragedy
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Tyre Nichols ’ mother was just steps away from her son but couldn't hear his anguished cries.
Beaten and broken, struggling to survive, Nichols had called out for her as five Memphis Police Department officers punched him, kicked him, and hit him with a baton after a traffic stop on Jan. 7.
Nichols, 29, who lived with his mom and stepdad, had slipped from the grasp of police after he was pulled over, dragged from his car and hit with a stun gun. Caught minutes later near their home and beaten savagely by five officers, he screamed, “Mom! Mom!"
Moments later, the police knocked on the mother’s door, but not to alert RowVaughn Wells that her child had been savagely beaten, according to Rodney Wells, her husband and Nichols' stepfather. They said Nichols had been arrested for driving under the influence and was being taken to the hospital. Police said they could not go to the hospital because their son was under arrest.
So they waited.
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Memphis Police Director Cereyln “CJ” Davis, a mother herself, didn’t find out what her officers had done to Nichols until later either. The lack of police supervisors on the scene would be noted by many after Nichols died Jan. 10.
The fact that no one felt compelled to fill her in until the following day raised questions about the culture of her department she would have to answer in the coming days, even as she was asking them herself.
“There were failures of who should render aid, who should have notified, who went to the mother’s house, how they communicated,” Davis told the Associated Press in a Jan, 27 interview. "Why did the chief get notified at 4 o' clock in the morning and the incident occurred at 8 o' clock the previous night?”
It was around that same time of 4 a.m. that RowVaughn Wells received a...