11-Year-Old Kid Still Traumatized Just Because Cop Shot Him In Chest
Aderrien Murry deserves more justice than he's likely to receive.
Nakala Murry's ex-boyfriend and the father of one of her children showed up at her Mississippi home at 4 a.m. Saturday, May 20. She said he was "irate," and fearing for her family's safety, she asked her 11-year-old son, Aderrien, to call 911.
When Indianola Police Department Officer Greg Capers arrived at the scene, he didn't ask any questions, look for Murry's ex, or otherwise attempt to de-escalate the situation. Instead, he had his gun drawn at the front door and ordered everyone in the home to come outside. When Aderrien came around the corner of a hallway, into the living room, with his arms raised above his head, Capers shot the child in the chest.
“I just tried to follow the police commands but I guess that didn’t work,” Aderrien said.
No, it didn’t. CNN reports that after the shooting, Aderrien was given a chest tube and placed on a ventilator. He suffered a collapsed lung, fractured ribs, and a lacerated liver, according to his mother. We remind you that he is 11. The police were supposed to protect him and his family from a violent man, but another violent man with a badge shot him in the chest.
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Aderrien survived the shooting in the most literal sense, but he's a very different child now. His full recovery might take years, if not his entire life.
“Sometimes, I can see myself laying inside the coffin. Those are my thoughts at night, my only ones,” Aderrien told CNN’s Nick Valencia in an interview last week. “Sometimes I think people are watching me. But my main thought is me dead, inside the coffin.”
Ten days after the shooting, Aderrien’s young body is still wracked with pain. He struggled to breathe at times and is unable to run and jump as he used to do. But he believes he’s still alive “because of the grace of God.”
“I think God has a plan for me. I don’t know it yet,” he said, but he will “know it soon.”
Officer Capers almost cut that plan short with little hesitation. Capers is currently on paid administrative leave (I.e. a “shoot-cation”) while the shooting is investigated, and this includes a probe by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. The shooting was reportedly captured on body camera video but has not yet been released.
The attorney for Aderrien and his mother, Carlos Moore, told CNN that he couldn't believe this shooting was possible.
"A trained officer shooting an unarmed 11-year-old?” Moore said. “For him to do this, to shoot a boy that obeyed his commands, he came out with his hands up, and get shot in the chest? Unheard of.”
Unfortunately, these incidents are very much "heard of." In 2019, an Illinois cop shot a 12-year-old Black child with an assault rifle during a botched pre-dawn raid. (The child was in bed and, of course, unarmed.) In 2010, a SWAT team shot and killeda sleeping seven-year-old Black girl in Detroit. (The police weren't charged.) However, here a child specifically called the police for help and was shot in response.
While bleeding on the floor, Aderrien started singing the gospel hymn “No Weapon Formed Against Me Shall Prosper." He asked his mother to tell his family and his teacher he was “sorry for what he did.”
But he hadn’t done anything wrong. Meanwhile, no one from the police department came to see Aderrien at the hospital.
Aderrien wants Capers to explain why he shot him — although any such explanation will probably involve some crap about how an 11-year-old Black child somehow resembled a hulking six-foot-tall adult. He thinks Capers should lose his job, although precedent is against this outcome. “I could have lost my life. All because of you,” Aderrien said.
He views the police differently since the shooting, but that’s not all: He thinks he see cops and other people there to harm him when he’s alone in a dark room. He sometimes see Capers himself, “standing inside corners, just staring at me.”
Aderrien's family has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking $5 million. They rightly accuse the police of excessive force, negligence, reckless endangerment, and civil assault and battery. Mayor Ken Featherstone, who's asked that everyone "trust the process" during the investigation, said the city has nowhere near that kind of money in the bank.
Let's at least hope that Capers doesn't walk free from this or, perhaps worse, keep his job. But those are just dreams.
NOTE: Any comments defending Aderrien's shooting will be deleted.
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The city doesn't have that kind of money in the bank? Guess they shouldn't have had a trigger-happy cop who can't tell a child from an assailant on the payroll, then.
NOTE: Any comments defending Aderrien's shooting will be deleted.
Until we can figure out a way to punch those commenters in the mouth* through the internets.
* Yeah, yeah... with votes.