Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has called for six Raleigh police officers who stunned Darryl “Tyree” Williams to be fired and charged with manslaughter.
“How can we have peace in North Carolina until we have justice for Darryl ‘Tyree’ Williams?” said Crump, who is representing Williams’s family, at a Thursday news conference around the corner from where Williams was stunned.
“We come here to disturb the peace and the fact that we don’t want everybody to sleep comfortably saying we can just kill Black people unnecessarily and that’s justifiable.”
Williams, a 32-year-old Black man, died at a hospital after being tased and handcuffed by officers in a southeast Raleigh neighborhood on Jan. 17.
Officers J.T. Thomas, C.D. Robinson, D.L. Aquino, J.R. Scott, D.L. Grande and B.L. Ramge have been placed on administrative leave for their involvement in the stop.
Body camera footage, area surveillance footage and dash camera footage from the encounter released last week showed Thomas and Robinson approached Williams and a passenger as they sat in a car. Officers began asking questions before instructing Williams and his passenger to exit the vehicle.
At some point, a struggle broke out as officers attempted to place Williams under arrest. Officers threatened to stun Williams if he did not comply, and soon after a stun gun was deployed. The shock caused Williams to fall to the ground.
“Why are you all doing this to me?” Williams can be heard asking, before officers warn he will be stunned again if he does not place his hands behind his back.
The stun gun was then deployed.
At this point, Williams can be heard telling officers, “I have heart problems.”
In total, Williams was stunned three times, twice through direct body contact with the stun gun. In the video, as Williams lay on the ground, he could be heard moaning.
“Why don’t the police believe us?” Crump said Thursday. “When George Floyd said that I couldn’t breathe, they didn’t believe him. When Eric Gardner in Staten Island, New York, said I can’t breathe, they didn’t believe him. And they didn’t believe Darryl ‘Tyree’ when he said, ‘I got heart problems,’ because if they would have believed they would have stopped.”
This, Crump said, is willful disregard for human life — the definition of manslaughter.
Crump compared Williams’s encounter with law enforcement to that of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who was severely beaten by six Black officers in Memphis, Tenn., also last month. Nichols died from his injuries three days after the beating.
Crump called it a “tragic irony” that both men had similar names but added that Memphis has provided a “blueprint” for police departments around the country.
“They fired the police, arrested the police and charged the police in 20 days,” said Crump. “When we saw what happened on the video in Memphis, the police chief said that it was important for the community to see us take swift action. … She was talking about the Memphis community. I hope she was also talking about the American community.”
Charges against the officers involved in Williams’s stop have not been fired or charged.