A portrait of Tyre Nichols is displayed at a memorial service for him on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023 in Memphis, Tenn. Nichols was killed during a traffic stop with Memphis Police on Jan. 7.
Adrian Sainz/AP Photo
Rodney King’s daughter is sickened by beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis.
Nearly 32 years after her fathers’ beating, she can’t comprehend how police brutality continues.
Lora King says the race of the 5 officers involved in Nichols’ beating is irrelevant.
When Lora King — Rodney King’s oldest daughter — first came across news of the police killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, she was so sickened she had to take a break from reading.
Now 38, King was only 7 in March 1991 when her father was kicked, stunned, and punched by four white Los Angeles Police officers in the San Fernando Valley.
The beating — which her dad survived — was caught on video. It was one of the earliest cases in which a civilian’s recording of police brutality led to protests.
“It’s very, very sickening. This is nothing you can explain to children,” King told Insider on Wednesday, a day after Nichols’ autopsy report was released.
Tyre Nichols, 29, was sent to the hospital in critical condition after a January 7 traffic stop and died three days later.
On Monday, law enforcement officials allowed Nichols’ family and their lawyers to privately view body-camera footage of Nichols’ arrest.
After seeing the footage, which is has not yet been released to the public, attorney Antonio Romanucci said at a Wednesday press conference that Nichols was “defenseless the entire time” while the five police officers, all of whom were also Black, beat him just 80 yards from his home.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said Nichols was shocked, pepper sprayed, and restrained during the encounter.
In a statement Tuesday, Crump said an autopsy commissioned by the Nichols family shows he “suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating, and that his observed injuries are consistent with what the family and attorneys witnessed on the video of his fatal encounter with police on January 7, 2023.”
The Memphis Police Department said last week that it had fired the five officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Justin Smith, and Desmond Mills Jr. — after an administrative investigation into Nichols’ death. Two firefighters who …read more
Source:: Business Insider