A young, unarmed black man was shot 20 times in his grandmother’s backyard in California.
Now his brother is fighting through grief to demand justice.
“They gunned him down like a dog,” Stevante Clark said of the police shooting of his brother, Stephon. “They executed him.”
Stevante was in the back seat of a car, his voice quivering. He stomped his feet 20 times one for each bullet that police fired at his unarmed brother.
The killing of Stephon Clark on 18 March by Sacramento police has sparked outrage and massive protests in the Californian capital, drawing comparisons with other cases of law enforcement killing unarmed black people, such as Oscar Grant, Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
Stephon, an unarmed 22-year-old father of two, was standing in his grandmother’s backyard holding only his iPhone when officers, who did not announce they were police, appeared in the dark, shouted at him to reveal his hands and quickly fired a round of bullets at him before he could respond.
His brother, Stevante, 25, has been thrust into the national spotlight and forced to navigate media, protests, lawyers and donations while struggling through his own grief and anger.
Sequita Thompson, Stephon’s grandmother, was sitting in her dining room when she heard the “boom boom boom”, she said on Monday.
Afraid of the bullets, she grabbed her seven-year-old granddaughter and they crawled to a bedroom.
Source: The Guardian
