COLUMBUS, Ohio — The voice on the 911 call is a teenage girl’s, and it is quavering, as if she has been crying.
“I want to leave this foster home,” she tells the dispatcher. “I want to leave this foster home.”
When two police officers arrived at the home in Columbus, Ohio, they reported later, they met an agitated ninth grader, Ja’Niah Bryant, who told them that the fighting at 3171 Legion Lane was getting worse and worse.
They said there was nothing they could do, and this seemed to push her over an edge. She became “irate,” the officers wrote in their report, and told them that if she was not allowed to leave, “she was going to kill someone.”
Twenty-three days later, Ja’Niah called 911 again, telling the police that she and her older sister were being threatened by two young women who used to live at the house. Officers arrived in the middle of a melee outside the house, and one of them fatally shot Ja’Niah’s 16-year-old sister, Ma’Khia Bryant, who was lunging at one of the women, brandishing a steak knife.
The shooting, which occurred moments before a jury in Minneapolis convicted Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd, released a new wave of anger over shootings by the police. To calm the furor, the Columbus police quickly released body camera footage, which showed some of the fight outside the house and, they said, demonstrated that the officer had acted to protect the other woman.
But Ms. Bryant’s tragic death was also preceded by a turbulent journey through the foster care system, which had cycled Ma’Khia through at least five placements in two years — after her own mother was found to be negligent — despite efforts by their grandmother to reunite the family.
Ohio places children in foster care at least at a rate 10 percent higher than the national average, and child welfare officials here are considerably less likely than in the country as a whole to place children with their relatives. Black children, like Ma’Khia and her sister, account for nearly a third of children removed from homes — nearly twice their proportion in the population.
A review of Ma’Khia’s pathway through foster care shows that it failed her in critical ways.
Research has demonstrated that children fare far better when they remain with family members, a practice known as kinship care. It also shows that each successive placement causes additional trauma, further setting back a child in crisis.
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What the Bryant sisters wanted, Ja’Niah said, was to return to their family.
“We can go to Mommy or Grandma, it doesn’t matter, as long as we can get off the system,” Ja’Niah recalled Ma’Khia telling her younger siblings, who were also in foster care. “That was her biggest thing, she didn’t want to be in the foster care system until she was 18.”
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The oldest of four children born to Paula Bryant, a nursing assistant, and Myron Hammonds, Ma’Khia was removed from her mother’s home in 2018, and spent 16 months living with her grandmother Jeanene Hammonds.
When her grandmother was kicked out by her landlord, the siblings went into foster care and spent two years cycling through short-term placements, arrangements that dissolved one after another.
People who knew Ma’Khia had trouble recognizing her in the chaotic footage of the shooting released by the police. Staff members at her school saw her as quiet and diligent, the kind of student who would hug her teacher’s aide every morning before math. She had a tight knot of girlfriends, who lavished one another with affection.
Aaliyaha Tucker, 16, recalled her once coming to school with her hair in an outrageous style she called a “rainbow horn,” extending vertically from the top of her head and then bursting into a mop.
“She didn’t care what other people thought of her,” said Aaliyaha, who allowed tears to run down her face. “She taught us how to love ourselves.”
By this spring, when Ma’Khia’s sister placed the first call to the police, her life in foster care had spiraled into dysfunction and disorder, family members said. And it was about to get much worse.
In 2018, Paula Bryant had moved with her five children — including a teenage son from a previous relationship — into a house in West Columbus, where, she said in an interview, the landlords did not mind her credit problems. Mr. Hammonds, Ma’Khia’s father, did not live with the family and Ms. Bryant described herself as raising the children largely on her own.
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The family had been on the radar of Children Services for several years, amid repeated complaints that the two youngest children were absent from school. In February 2017, Ms. Bryant took Ma’Khia, Ja’Niah and two younger siblings to one of the agency’s offices and said “she was at her wits end” and could no longer handle them, according to a Children Services document outlining the case. The children, Ms. Bryant told the agency, had “no respect” for those around them.
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Ms. Hammonds, their grandmother, took the four children into her two-bedroom apartment, sleeping on the couch so the children could have the beds.
“I was worn out,” she recalled. “I was doing all the laundry, all the cooking, and I was working a part-time job at the time. And it was difficult because these children came from a lot of dysfunction.”
Then her landlord found out that the children had moved into the apartment and told her she would have to move. …
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… the county placed all four children in foster care.
Ms. Hammonds slept wherever she could for several months — sometimes in hotel rooms, sometimes with friends, and many nights in her car — until she secured a home that could accommodate the children. In December 2019, Ms. Hammonds submitted a petition to the court for their return, but it was rejected.
The girls, meanwhile, were placed in group homes. Ja’Niah recalled that, not long after their grandmother dropped them off, she and Ma’Khia were told they had to go into separate rooms for physical examinations. When she emerged, her sister was no longer there.
“I said, ‘Where’s my sister?’” she said. “It was like, ‘We don’t know, we’ll check,’ but he never got back. So that’s when I realized we were being split up.”
After that, Ja’Niah said, the two sisters moved through half a dozen living situations. There was, she said, a foster home so strict that Ma’Khia was often not allowed to leave the house; a group home with dog feces on the floor; a foster mother who screamed at the top of her lungs, not realizing Ma’Khia was recording it all on her phone.
Even when the living situation was good, and a foster parent in Dayton mused about adopting Ma’Khia, her sister was not interested, Ja’Niah said. “She wanted to get back to me, to family. To Columbus,” she said.
At school, Ma’Khia kept her family issues to herself. Jessica Oakley, the teacher’s aide who worked with her at Canal Winchester High School, recalled her as “a hard worker, a sweet girl, very shy.” At the end of ninth grade, she made the school’s honor roll.
She was diligent about schoolwork, and continued to seek out Ms. Oakley’s assistance even when the school shut down because of the coronavirus, once spending eight hours with her teacher on a Google Hangout, going through all her homework.
“She was definitely my girl,” Ms. Oakley said.
She said it was rare for Ma’Khia to mention anything about her family — except for Ja’Niah.
“She was very protective of her sister,” she said. “She was like, ‘No one messes with my baby sister.’”
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The two girls ended up at Ms. Moore’s house on Legion Lane — not far from their grandmother’s house, and together for the first time since they left her care.
The suburban home is neat and well-tended, with bunches of artificial yellow flowers poking out of the turf beside the door. The two sisters would make TikTok videos, dance, go skating, or go to an amusement center called Scene75 that has rides and video games, Ms. Moore said. Ma’Khia, she said, was not troublesome.
“She’s a quiet girl. She doesn’t start fights anywhere. She wasn’t a troubled child,” she said. “She was fun. She loved her family. She loved her siblings. They were close.”
Still, Ms. Moore placed repeated calls to 911 in which she seemed to struggle to manage the children she had taken in.
Sometimes, she was calling to report that a teenager had “gone AWOL,” failing to return home by curfew. But late last year, Ms. Moore sounded deeply shaken as she asked the police to remove a 10-year-old boy — or, as she put it, “one of my irate foster youths” — from her home.
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Ms. Cates, who formerly cared for Ma’Khia, said Ms. Moore faced a problem common to many foster parents: The agency expected her to work full-time outside the home, a situation that forced her to leave foster children unsupervised.
“I believe she was a loving, caring foster parent,” she said. But, she added, “foster parenting is a full-time job.”
By this spring, Ja’Niah said, Ms. Moore’s home had become increasingly tense. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, she said, Ms. Moore had accused the girls of stealing the cards that carry cash benefits for food.
And she said Ms. Moore sometimes left them unsupervised, or with former foster children, women in their 20s who, she said, berated them and mocked Ma’Khia’s speech impediment.
After school on April 20, the two Bryant girls found themselves alone in the house with Tionna Bonner, 22, one of Ms. Moore’s former foster children and, Ja’Niah said, her special favorite.
Ms. Bonner, who had come to celebrate Ms. Moore’s birthday the previous day, was now scolding the girls, saying they were habitually disrespecting Ms. Moore.
“She’s like, ‘My mom told you all to clean up this house, it’s dirty,’” Ja’Niah said.
The dispute escalated quickly, but when Ja’Niah called Ms. Moore, who was at work, she said she was too busy to get involved, Ja’Niah said. So each of them called for backup: Ja’Niah called her grandmother, and Ms. Bonner called another young woman, Shai-Onta Craig-Watkins, 20, who had lived in the house as a foster child. …
Ms. Hammonds rushed over and described standing on the stairway inside, trying to protect her granddaughters as the older women threatened to beat them up. Ms. Bonner had pulled out a knife, Ja’Niah and her grandmother said, and Ma’Khia had grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen. Ja’Niah went into her room and called 911. In the call, placed at 4:32 p.m., Ja’Niah asked for help as people shouted in the background.
Someone could be heard saying, “I’m not scared of no knife.”
“It’s 3171 Legion Lane,” Ja’Niah told the dispatcher. “We got Angie’s grown girls trying to fight us, trying to stab us, trying to put her hands on our grandma. Get here now!”
Twelve minutes later, the police arrived.
In a brief lull, Ms. Craig-Watkins left the house and the sisters began to pack up their things, thinking the worst of the situation was over. As they rushed out of the house, their father was pulling in to come to their aid. But also arriving was Ms. Craig-Watkins, who had returned with two more people. The two groups crossed paths, and Ms. Craig-Watkins spit toward the family, Ja’Niah and Ms. Hammonds said.
“I feel like that really made Ma’Khia really mad when she spit,” Ja’Niah said. “That’s when everything just went left.”
A police officer stepped out of his car and walked toward the driveway just as Ma’Khia turned her attention to Ms. Craig-Watkins and could be heard on a video from a neighbor’s surveillance camera threatening to stab her.
As Ma’Khia charged, Ms. Craig-Watkins tumbled to the ground, and Ma’Khia’s father tried to kick her. Ma’Khia turned to Ms. Bonner and backed her up against a car.
Ma’Khia raised a knife, and Officer Nicholas Reardon, a white 23-year-old who was the first officer to approach the scene, shot four times at Ma’Khia, who slumped down.
As Ma’Khia’s body lay on the ground, police officers led Ja’Niah inside Ms. Moore’s house, along with her father’s young son.
Ja’Niah turned on the television to find some cartoons for her younger brother to watch. Instead, what flashed on the screen first was a news report: a jury in Minneapolis had found Mr. Chauvin guilty of murdering Mr. Floyd.
Before an officer took her phone, she sneaked into a bathroom and made one more call for help.
“I called my real mom — my biological mom — and I told her, I said, ‘I need you. They just shot Ma’Khia. Get here now,’” Ja’Niah recalled. “I needed her” (Bogel-Burroughs, Barry, and Wright 1-7).
As Officer Reardon got out of his vehicle, he encountered seven people outside a two-story brick home and asked, “What’s going on?” Yelling could be heard in the background.
An unidentified girl appeared to fall to the grass after being attacked by Ms. Bryant and then kicked by an unidentified man. The video footage then showed Ms. Bryant, who was holding a knife, appearing to lunge toward a person dressed in pink who was pinned against a car parked in the driveway.
“Hey! Hey!” Officer Reardon said as he pulled his gun. “Get down! Get down!”
He fired four quick shots, and Ms. Bryant dropped to the ground at the edge of the driveway.
A witness yelled, “Why did you shoot her?”
The officer responded, “She came at her with a knife,” apparently referring to Ms. Bryant and the person dressed in pink.
Chief Woods said Columbus officers were allowed to use deadly force to protect somebody who was in danger of being killed by another person. A Taser, he said, is generally reserved for situations where there is no immediate threat of death. Officers are not required to call out that they are about to fire their weapon, he added, though they try to if there is time.
“Were there other options? Not if she was about to stab that woman,” Dr. [Geoffrey P.] Alpert [a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina] said, adding that a Taser could take too long to deploy, and that the less-than-lethal weapons are not 100 percent reliable. “He’s protecting her life, not his own,” he said. “What if it didn’t work and she ended up killing this woman?”
Still, Ms. Bryant’s family and activists across Columbus questioned why the officer shot Ms. Bryant.
“I don’t know why he shot her,” Ms. Moore, Ms. Bryant’s foster parent, said. “I don’t know why he didn’t Tase her, why they didn’t try to break it up.”
She added, “At the end of the day, it wasn’t worth all this.”
Tensions over police shootings of Black people were already raw around Columbus. In early December, Casey Goodson Jr., 23, was shot to death at the entrance of his home by a Franklin County sheriff’s deputy who had been searching for someone else. Two weeks later, Andre Hill was shot by a Columbus police officer who was later charged with felony murder (Williams, Healy, and Wright 1-2).
Bryant’s death has become a debate that questions a child’s actions — and worthiness to live — instead of another example of the racism of policing and the institution’s failure to provide wholesome support, care, and safety for the communities it serves. The insistence that Reardon had no other option than to take Bryant’s life to save others — though he risked everyone’s life in the process — displays the lack of consideration and value that society places on the lives of Black girls and women.
Treva Lindsey, a professor of African American women’s history at Ohio State University, told Vox that there are those who won’t see Bryant as a victim but as someone who brought this on herself. And even for those who do see her as a victim, they’ll still victim-blame, erasing the systemic oppression — including that Black children are far more likely to be in foster care than their white counterparts, and kids in foster care are often exposed to high levels of violence — that brought her to being killed at the hands of the police.
“People will say ‘I’m really sad this whole scenario happened, but had she not had that knife …’ That becomes the ‘but,’ the qualifier, the caveat. And too often we have a caveat when it comes to defending, protecting, and caring for Black girls,” Lindsey said.
… Bryant’s death sparked debate across media and social media about whether the officer should have shot the 16-year-old.
On Face the Nation, Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), a former Orlando police chief, vehemently defended the officers’ actions, saying that police are forced to make calls in the heat of the moment. “Everybody has the benefit of slowing the video down and seizing the perfect moment. The officer on the street does not have that ability. He or she has to make those split-second decisions, and they’re tough.”
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… Psychologist Merushka Bisetty explained in an essay for Vox that children like Bryant may “present with aggression and an inability to self-regulate their emotions and, consequently, engage in behaviors that can seem aggressive or involve weapons,” but that doesn’t mean that these situations “require or should be met with violent force.” Instead, it’s the role of intervening professionals to stop an aggressive interaction from becoming fatal.
That the reaction to Bryant’s killing has turned into a debate about whether the use of force is justified is an attempt to “displace blame onto the victim and their family rather than on the systems that created situations that led to her death,” Bisetty, who has provided services in shelters, schools, and jails, wrote. “It is worth considering whether Bryant might have still been alive today if a mental health expert — or someone else trained in nonviolent deescalation — had responded to the call.”
It’s also worth considering whether the police officer would have fired shots if Bryant or the people involved in the altercation were white. There are countless examples of police peacefully apprehending white boys and men wielding weapons. …
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“It’s important for us to continuing highlighting and vocalizing how the inhumanity of white supremacy shows up in the lives of Black women and girls,” Lindsey said. “When we’re equipped with the full truth of how it operates, we have a better chance at rooting out the operating system of white supremacy and anti-Blackness” (Cineas 1-7).
[Paste the following on Google to watch a 3 minute ABC-produced video]
New video shows Columbus police shooting of teenager Ma ...
Works cited:
Bogel-Burroughs, Nicholas; Barry, Ellen; and Wright, Will. “Ma’Khia Bryant’s Journey through Foster Care Ended with an Officer’s Bullet.” The New York Times, May 8, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/us/columbus-makhia-bryant-foster-care.html
Cineas, Fabiola. “Why They’re Not Saying Ma’Khia Bryant’s Name.” Vox, May 1, 2021. Net. https://www.vox.com/22406055/makhia-bryant-police-shooting-columbus-ohio
Williams, Kevin; Healy, Jack; and Wright, Will. “ ‘A Horrendous Tragedy’: The Chaotic Moments before a Police Shooting in Columbus.” The New York Times, updated May 8, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/us/columbus-police-shooting-bryant.html
