MIKE BROWN. WALTER SCOTT. TAMIR RICE. Laquan McDonald. Eric Garner. Freddie Gray. Before all of them, there was Tyrone West.
Yet Tawanda’s brother was probably the least-known among the lineup of victims whose deaths had spurred marches throughout the nation over the last few years as the Black Lives Matter movement emerged. That wasn’t fair. But Tawanda had given up on fair a long time ago—from the moment they’d assigned Tyrone the name “John Doe” even though he had a driver’s license on him with all of his identifying information.
It was five days before they would let her see her brother’s body. The police officer who had been dropping in and out of her home did try to prepare her: “You might have to have a closed casket,” he said.
In the days since his death hit the news, community activists and city representatives had done what they do best: show up to help when it was too late. A community activist said he’d help pay for the funeral, and that would be $10,000 that she could keep in her daughter’s college fund and one less thing to worry about, so she gratefully accepted it. The gift never came through, after the family learned that the money would come with people dictating details of how they grieved, down to where they held a candlelight vigil.
Tawanda had called and asked the funeral home not to pump her brother full of embalming fluid until she saw what was left of him after his encounter with the police. The funeral director said something about germs, but she didn’t care. She and her brother shared the same blood.
In the car on the way over to Brown, she prayed for God to give her strength to see what was left of Tyrone. She expected that he’d be bruised, maybe even disfigured.
“I didn’t know your brother, but he looks pretty good,” the funeral home lady told Tawanda before leading her to the preparation room where her brother’s body awaited.
What she saw stopped her heart.
“No, no!” she screamed.
Tyrone was smiling.
Tawanda knew two things: that her brother had not been smiling when he died handcuffed on the hot pavement, and that someone had reconstructed his face to make it seem that for the past five days he had been resting in peace. She also knew that she couldn’t understand how the body she viewed, her brother’s soulless corpse, could be defined by anybody as looking good. In addition to boot prints on the side of his head, on his neck, and all over his body, she stared at the elongated scars on his torso from the baton beatings that she could only describe as looking like train tracks. He had chunks of skin cut away from his face. She placed the burgundy sheet back over his body, knowing the images she just witnessed would haunt her forever.
That’s when she realized that she couldn’t rely on any of those jokers in expensive suits, paying their respects to the family as if they cared. That’s when she knew she was going to have to take matters into her own hands, even if it meant taking on the very people in power who were supposed to protect her and her family.
Before Tyrone’s cold body was claimed, police were putting the finishing touches on a narrative they’d started working on when they pulled him down to the pavement by his dreadlocks on Kitmore Road. But the black men who died just like him helped Tawanda put together a narrative of her own over the years. That was the moment the police yelled at him not to resist, but he wasn’t resisting; he was fighting for his life, just like Trayvon. They attacked him because they were “scared” of his size, like with Mike. Because they instantly treated him as a threat, like Tamir. Because he was an unarmed black man, driving his car and minding his own business, like Walter. Because he was acting “erratically,” like Laquan. So he had to be manhandled, like Anthony. And he died because for some reason he couldn’t breathe, like Eric. From the moment her brother was stopped, the police had been building a case not just for killing him but for assassinating his character.
At first they claimed he’d been in poor health. “Did your brother have a heart condition?” the detective asked when he came to the house.
Then they painted him as a liar. “Mr. West handed me his driver’s license and it had a fake weight and height,” another officer told her.
And a drug user: “Come on, you gonna arrest me for these measly bags?” the police recalled him asking when they had him on the ground.
Tyrone had just had a physical, and he was healthy. He loved the ladies, so he kept his towering frame in shape, looking buff. He exercised by walking every morning, sometimes from East Baltimore to West, and he’d get in some extra walking as he helped his grandmother exercise. As a Christian, he took seriously that his body was a temple. Tawanda only knew her brother to smoke a little weed here and there, and like every other part of the investigation conducted by the city, the toxicology result was suspicious: it found cocaine in his urine, but no drugs in his bloodstream. Besides, he could’ve used every drug on the market, but that’s not a capital crime warranting summary execution by cops on the street.
And “measly”? Tawanda had never heard her brother use that word in his life.
Tawanda knew that if it had been her, if she’d died and police said they found her drunk with a pack of Newports on the highway, Tyrone would have smelled a lie. She’d had two Coors in her entire life and gotten pissy drunk, and she hadn’t touched the stuff since then. She’s terrified of highways, and on her way to her job at a suburban school she allows twenty extra minutes so that she can take a route through city streets and avoid the highway.
They lie about the dead because the dead can’t talk, Tawanda thought.
But Tyrone talked to her.
About a year after her brother’s death, Tawanda had tossed and turned in her bed one night, asking Tyrone and God for a sign. Her brother had been the subject of many prayers since the day he was killed, and though he was buried, she was convinced he wasn’t resting, so neither could she.
She knew he had not found peace because she could feel him stirring everywhere. Sometimes she could still hear his voice: Sis, don’t let me go out like that with no heart attack. You know I’m healthy.
They had always had a spiritual sibling connection, starting when they were little. They would have silent conversations just by looking at each other, an unspoken language like the kind they say twins sometimes have. Each could sense when the other was in trouble, too. If somebody was messing with her, before she could even call his name, he was coming around the corner. Every day, the guilt of not having been able to have his back the way he’d always done for her was too much to bear.
The night she’d been unable to sleep, she’d heard a loud crash, and she got up from her bed to tiptoe throughout the house, worrying that she was going to have to confront an intruder. But her fiancé was still sound asleep, and the kids were motionless in their room.
When she returned to her room, she looked down at her bed, and there was a photo of Tyrone staring back up at her. She knew the photo: it had been affixed to the bedroom mirror. It wouldn’t even come off with Windex when she cleaned it.
The clock struck three. She only had two and a half more hours before she had to be up, get dressed, and get the kids ready to go to school, so she gave up on sleep and turned to a pastime she had engaged in a lot in recent months. She flicked the remote on the TV and turned to the Investigation Discovery channel, which featured true-crime programs—the ones where police go back and retrace their steps, or some new piece of evidence turns up, and at the end someone cries out, “I knew it!”
It was the top of the hour, just in time for a new episode of one of the shows she’d been watching. She loved when she could track a case from the beginning. She almost always solved the case before the police did.
This episode was about a decade-old case of a young kid whose death had been ruled an accidental drowning, but his mother remained unconvinced. Yup, families always know, Tawanda thought. The mortician on the television described how the case was extraordinary, how after all of these years the little boy’s tissue was intact, as if he’d been waiting for his mother to find out the truth: he had been poisoned.
You gotta be kidding me, Tawanda thought, sitting up slightly.
When the new test results came back, the mother on the television ended up filing charges against her sister. It turned out that the boy’s aunt had been molesting him. They’d found his body in a creek down by the sister’s house one day, though nobody ever understood how he’d gotten there. With that revelation, things started to make sense for the mother—how her son had always cried when she dropped him off at her sister’s before she went to work.
Tawanda sat in her bed, breathless, as she realized what Tyrone was trying to tell her. The only way she was going to unearth the truth was to unearth her brother’s body.