Justice in Dallas County, Texas: Echoes of Money, Mississippi

Ex-Balch Springs PD Officer Roy Oliver guilty in
the murder of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards

The news that a Texas jury found former Balch Springs Police Officer Roy D. Oliver, II guilty on Tuesday for the unjustified fatal shooting of 15-year-old high school freshman Jordan Edwards is hardly a cause for celebration.

On a Saturday night back in April, 2017, Oliver pointed a high-powered rifle at a car full of unarmed teenagers who were driving away from a house party and pulled the tigger.


The fatal shot, one of three Oliver fired into the window of the vehicle, struck Edwards in the head as he sat in the passenger seat, killing him instantly - his brothers Vidal and Kevon (along with two friends) were inside the car when it happened.

I blogged about this incident last May if you're interested in reading about some of the details, but Edwards and his brothers were among approximately 100 teenagers milling around outside a party when a neighbor called Balch Springs PD because it was getting rowdy.

Oliver and his partner were actually in the house speaking with the home owner as teens were leaving when shots rang out outside, and as teens began scrambling for safety, Edwards, his brothers and their friends got in the car to leave the area.

Oliver, who'd ran outside when the shots were fired, saw the teens in the car and began yelling and cursing at the vehicle, aimed his rifle and fired three shots in the passenger window - just like that.

According to a Dallas Morning News article on Tuesday, those shots were actually fired from a nearby nursing home.

Since the vehicle was driving away from Oliver when the shooting happened, he tried to use the defense many police officers who've shot and killed innocent people have successfully used time and time again in America - he lied about what happened.

Oliver told police investigators that the car came toward him in an "aggressive manner", but police body-cam footage taken at the scene (along with witness testimony) revealed that the teens were simply driving away and that the vehicle was not driving towards Oliver.

14-YO Emmitt Till and Carolyn Bryant, the 21-
YO store clerk who accused him in 1955

It was moving away from him when he fired the shots - Oliver later tried to claim that he shot at the vehicle because he feared for his partner's safety.

But his partner testified on the stand that he never felt his life was in danger.

It only took the jury two days to find Oliver guilty of Edwards' death on Tuesday August 28th.

And as author Angie Thomas observed on Twitter on Tuesday, the date is also significant in the longer arc of American justice.


As she noted, Oliver was found guilty on August 28th, the very same date that 14-year-old Emmitt Till was brutally tortured and killed in Money, Mississippi back in 1955 by two white men enraged over accusations that he'd whistled suggestively at a 21-year-old white store clerk named Carolyn Bryant while he was buying bubblegum inside the small store she ran with her husband Roy Bryant.

A few nights later at around 2am, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam armed themselves and abducted Till from his great-uncle Moses Wright's home, savagely beat and tortured him, before shooting him in the head, tying his body to an engine block with wire and dumping it in the Tallahatchie River.

Exactly what happened between Till and Bryant inside that store has always been shrouded in mystery, but as was widely reported last year, Carolyn Bryant told writer Timothy Tyson that her original claims that Till had put his hand around her waste, verbally propositioned her and tried to physically touch her were not true.

62 years after the trial she admitted she made that part up.

J.W. Milam (left) and Roy Bryant celebrate after
their acquittal by an all-white jury  

Whether she admitted that to clear her own conscience at the age of 83 only she really knows.

But such an admission did Emmitt Till little good.

The horrifying photos of his mangled face, which sparked outrage around the nation and helped to spark the civil rights movement in America, attest to the depth of his suffering and the unfathomable cruelty and brutality of the crime.

Which both Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam freely admitted to in an interview with Look magazine after being acquitted by an all-white jury in less than an hour.

Part of what's tragic about Till's murder, something that hasn't been widely reported, is that Till's mother Till Mobley claims that her son had a slight speech impediment that caused him to stutter sometimes when he tried to say words beginning with the letter 'B'.

As Chris Jones reported in the Chicago Tribune back in 2008 she insisted that her son wasn't trying to whistle at Carolyn Bryant in a sexual way - she'd taught him to whistle quietly whenever he stuttered as a way to relax himself and stop the stutter.

Her son, who was trying to order 2-cents worth of bubblegum in the store, likely began stuttering and whistled to make it stop - Bryant likely misunderstood what was happening, and the rest is history.

Now the specific circumstances of the death of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards in Texas last April are obviously very different from the death of Emmitt Till back in the summer of 1955.

Roy Oliver during sentencing on Tuesday 

But the context in which they both took place, against the backdrop of periods in American history defined in part by racial division, and the fact that they were both young black teenagers in the south who were innocent and unarmed when they were violently killed by enraged white men, links both cases in my view.

In ways that are emotional and even spiritual in some way given the complex backdrop of America's racial history.

To me, the outcome of this case occupies a larger dimension, not just because a police officer was held legally responsible for killing an innocent, unarmed American child for no reason (and then trying to lie about it).

It's also important because the circumstances touch on issues related to the two-tier justice system that still pervades the American legal system - this case bucked that trend.

At the time I'm writing this, none of the members of the jury have spoken out about the decision.

But I think there's little doubt that the atmosphere of divisiveness based on race, and the kinds of xenophobic retribution against undocumented immigrants that has been the hallmark of the Trump administration, weighed on the minds of the jury when they decided this case.

Both Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have made it perfectly clear that they have absolutely no interest in directing the resources of the the White House or Department of Justice to address, or investigate the cases of police misconduct or excessive use of force against unarmed, innocent people.

It's quite possible the members of the jury, who acquitted Roy Oliver on two counts of aggravated manslaughter, but found him guilty of Jordan Edwards' murder, felt a responsibility to send a message about the American justice system.

Not so much about race specifically, but to reaffirm that Americans believe that there is a definitive line between right and wrong in this country, no matter the color of your skin, where you hail from, who you love, or how you worship.

Such a decision taking place on the 28th of August, 62 years after the death of Emmitt Till in Money, Mississippi, offers hope that however long it may be, the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend towards justice.

Jordan Edwards & Cops Using Cars As License to Kill

Jordan Edwards, shot & killed by Balch Springs PD

Given the high profile announcements of bold policy changes from America's revamped Department of Justice over the past few weeks, the DOJ's silence in recent days has been deafening.

Particularly in the wake of the shocking death of 15-year-old Mesquite High School freshman Jordan Davis late Saturday evening in Texas at the hands of police officer Roy Oliver.



As multiple media outlets, including the Dallas News, are reporting, Jordan was one of what witnesses said were about a hundred teenagers who were attending a party at the home of a woman named Lisa Roberson on Saturday night in Balch Springs, Texas about 15 miles from Dallas.

Roberson was out of town, and like millions of other American teens (including your's truly) have done on occasion, her son threw a party.

But problems arose when large numbers of teens began milling about in neighbor's driveways on Baron Drive, and a resident named Dora Daniels called police because she was concerned about underage drinking.

When members of the Balch Springs PD arrived, teens naturally began scattering and at some point multiple witnesses heard what sounded like gun shots - which, given the conservative Republican-majority Texas state legislature's efforts to allow people to openly carry firearms virtually anywhere in public, isn't all that surprising.

Hearing the shots, Jordan Edwards, his two brothers Vidal and Kevon and two other friends jumped in a car and tried to drive away, but according to witnesses, a Balch Springs PD officer Roy Oliver approached the vehicle and was heard cursing loudly before he fired three shots from a rifle into the passenger side window - striking Davis in the head and killing him.

Edwards two brothers and their two other friends were roughly handcuffed and arrested as their brother and friend lay bleeding in the front seat of the vehicle.

Heartbroken parents Charmaine and Odell Edwards
at a press conference on Monday 

The specifics of this latest example of excessive use of force by police against a young unarmed man are painfully familiar to most Americans.

Jordan Edwards wasn't committing a crime.

He was unarmed and he'd done absolutely nothing to threaten or harm anyone, including the police officer who shot him in the head with a rifle.

The officer who shot him initially tried a tactic familiar to Americans too:


He lied to investigators to try and make it seem like he "feared for his personal safety" in order to try and justify taking the life of an unarmed American child.

The unnamed officer's initial claims that the car in which Edwards and his friends were driving had reversed and was somehow moving towards him in an "aggressive manner" were publicly, and to the Balch Springs PD's credit, quickly dismissed as bogus.

As Liam Stack and Christine Hauser reported in the New York Times yesterday, Balch Springs PD police chief Jonathan Haber announced that a review of video evidence showed that the car in which Edwards and his friends were driving was moving away from officer Oliver when he fired the fatal shots - not towards him.

Sound familiar? It should.

Remember back in July of 2015 when Seneca (South Carolina) PD lieutenant Mark Tiller shot and killed 19-year-old Zachary Hammond in the parking lot of a local Hardee's after the kid tried to drive away in the wake of a buy and bust operation?

19-year-old Zachary Hammond 

Hammond's 23-year-old date had unknowingly sold a small bag of weed to an undercover cop, when Lt. Tiller ran up to the vehicle with his pistol drawn, the poor kid panicked and tried to drive away.

Tiller fatally shot Hammond in the back and in the side, claiming he'd been forced to kill Hammond in self-defense because he feared the scared 19-year-old was going to run him over.


But a 42-second clip of police dashboard video of the incident showed that Hammond's vehicle was not only slowly trying to drive away, Tiller actually made multiple efforts to put himself in front of the vehicle.

Watch it for yourself, does that look like Hammond is purposefully trying to run Tiller over?

I'm not saying it was right for Hammond to try and flee, but neither was Tiller's decision to shoot and kill a scared kid who obviously terrified of being busted with weed in the car - he didn't deserve to be shot for that.

Investigators eventually ruled that Tiller had acted in self defense and he faced no charges.

The very same week that Hammond was shot in South Carolina back in July of 2015, the world was reacting in horror to the video footage of former University of Cincinnati campus police officer Ray Tensing shooting unarmed motorist Samuel Dubose in the head at point blank range while the motorist had his hands in the air.

Tensing, who was famously wearing a black t-shirt with a Confederate battle flag on it under his uniform when he pulled Dubose over for a missing license plate, initially told investigators that he'd been forced to shoot Dubose because the driver was dragging him along with his car.

But body-cam footage showed that the only reason that Dubose's car was moving was because Tensing had inexplicably shot the man in the head, forcing Dubose to slump forward and hit the accelerator.

Balch Springs PD officer Roy Oliver

While nothing can be done to bring back the victims of these flagrant and totally unjustified uses of deadly force, the rapidly expanding use of video technology on police vehicle dashboards and on the officers themselves is slowly starting to shed light on the propensity of some members of law enforcement to try and shield wrongdoing behind false allegations that a driver was trying to use a car to hurt or kill them.

The speed with which Balch Springs PD chief Jonathan Haber has moved to expose Roy Oliver's lies and fire him from the force is a clear indicator that, to a degree, technology is helping to pierce the Blue Wall of Silence that has shielded some members of law enforcement from facing responsibility for their actions.

But it's not just technology in this case.

After the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and so many other young unarmed Americans, there's also a growing recognition taking place.

Not just amongst the families of the victims, but also amongst law enforcement professionals, judges, local and city officials and the public at large that something is dangerously wrong with the way that some cops interact with young men.

But in the case of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, it's also the character of the young man himself that's led to the swift removal of Roy Oliver from the force for his actions last Saturday night.

The Mesquite High School body and the Texas community in which he and his family lived has been devastated by his death.

This is a kid who was a straight A student with an excellent GPA, and a great personality who was also a gifted student-athlete who was just getting ready to start a new football season and an exciting new chapter in his life.

This was a kid who'd left an impact on people he knew, including the Mesquite HS football coach who said of Edwards:

"You create a checklist of everything you would want in a player, a son, a teammate, a friend and Jordan had all that. He was that kid." 

There must be consequences for taking that away without just cause or reason, but as the Edwards' family attorney Lee Merritt said in response to the news of Oliver being fired, that's not enough.

The road to justice for Jordan Edwards, his family, his friends and his community is going to be a long one, and there won't be any help from Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice - so it's going to be up to the local and state courts to hold Oliver accountable for his actions.

In the meantime, instead of a high school freshman roster, Jordan Edwards joins the tragic list of the The Counted in America.