(See our frame-by-frame analysis of the footage here.)Īfter the gunshots, other video showed police approaching Bryant slumped over on the sidewalk and doing chest compressions on her, as witnesses screamed and shouted in dismay. On April 20, a Columbus police officer (who department leaders later identified as Nicholas Reardon, a one-year veteran of the department) arrived to a chaotic scene of people in a driveway and fired his gun four times, striking Bryant, after she charged two people with a knife. Tom Cottons, expressed similar criticism of James' alleged commentary.īefore we address James' messaging, let us explain what police body-camera video showed about Bryant's death. Other high-profile conservatives, such as Republican Sen. She claimed James, of the Los Angeles Lakers who hails from hails from Akron, Ohio (about 130 miles northeast of Columbus), tweeted that the officer was wrong to fatally shoot Bryant, and she argued that messaging was harmful considering the circumstances of the 911 call. In a roughly 11-minute Instagram Live video, she attempted to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement and supporters' sympathy towards Bryant by calling attention to the Twitter activity of LeBron James. Some posts framed the officer's actions as yet another senseless killing by law enforcement, while other accounts considered the cop a hero for arriving to a chaotic scene and making the split-second decision to shoot the teenager.Īmong the latter group was Candace Owens, a conservative pundit. However, James later deleted the tweet and said his push for increasing accountability of law-enforcement agencies "isn't about one officer" but rather the "entire system."Īfter a Columbus police officer fatally shot a 16-year-old Black girl named Ma'Khia Bryant in April 2021, social media was filled with reactions to her death. Soon after a jury convicted Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd, James indeed tweeted a photo that showed a white police officer who he believed killed Bryant with the message: "YOU'RE NEXT #ACCOUNTABILITY" and an hourglass emoji, implying the cop's use of deadly force was unjust like Chauvin's.
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