NEW: Combined Video Edit of Deadly Tyre Nichols Beating By Memphis Police Paints Horrifying Reality
The four separate videos depicting the deadly beating by police that ended the young life of Tyre Nichols are horrifying — perhaps even more so when edited together.
Nichols died on Jan. 10 after allegedly being beaten by Memphis Police Department officers during a Jan. 7 traffic stop. On Thursday, five officers were charged with murder in the case. Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy announced the charges against former officers Emmit Martin III, Justin Smith, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, and Desmond Mills — all of whom were fired a week ago
The release of the horrific video evidence of the beating was the subject of shocked anticipation Friday, and when it came, news outlets rushed to sift through the four separate videos to tell the story.
The videos are shocking and graphic and gut-wrenching, and many people have legitimately sought to avoid the trauma of watching yet another of these horrors. But the value of such visual documents to our history has been borne out time and again — the viewer may flinch, but history must not
The City of Memphis released four videos Friday night, each chilling and disturbing in its own right. The first features body cam video from a cop who joins the traffic stop already in progress, as the officers violently pull Mr. Nichols from the car and aggressively manhandle him as he pleads to know what he’s done wrong — then eventually breaks free and runs for his life:
The second video features 30 minutes of footage from a pole camera without sound. It shows most of the beating ad the shocking aftermath, during which Nichols is dragged around, propped up, abused — and never offered assistance until an ambulance arrived
The third video is body cam video of a cop who joins the beating already in progress. The cop pepper sprays Nichols, then walks away so the beating is no longer visible because he has apparently sprayed himself as well:
Video number 4 is another body cam of an officer joining the beating in progress. After a few seconds, the video is completely obscured, but the disturbing audio continues. The video resumes after the beating, and shows the officers bantering about the deed, getting their stories straight, and taunting Nichols.
In the aggregate, the videos document the atrocity with a level of detail that’s a testament to the transparency that has been hard-won since the era of Rodney King. That level of detail does obscure some of the immediacy of the attack. It’s tough to sift through.
We cut together and synchronized the videos where they overlap, and used the audio from the two body cam videos along with the pole video to give a beginning-to-end presentation of the attacks on Tyre Nichols, so you can see and hear what these cops did in as complete an order as we could manage:
