While many of us spent our Christmas Eve cozy at home with our families, eagerly awaiting Christmas, many Missouri activists shut down a major highway in the protest of the police shooting death of 18-year-old Antonio Martin, and his girlfriend Keanna Brown, spoke out at the scene of Martin’s killing, “He didn’t deserve to die,” Brown told The Huffington Post. “He was so scared, I’m telling you, he was so scared. He looked at me like ‘Baby, please jump in between and say something to save me.’”
MUST READ: Police Shoot & Kill Antonio Martin, A Black Teenager, 2 Miles From Ferguson & We Have Some Questions
Martin stayed at Brown’s home often, and she said she was with him earlier in the day before he was killed. She said the two were at home when Martin decided to walk to the gas station but, after some time had passed without his return, she grew worried. She walked down to the Mobil, where she found him bleeding on the concrete. “I should’ve been there to protect him, that’s all I wanted,” Brown said. “That was my baby.”
Brown also claims that the police would not let her comfort Martin, who laid on the concrete for a half an hour, as the authorities waited on the EMS to arrive. She kept telling the officer she was his girlfriend and Brown said, the officers said they didn’t care. “You can’t tell me you don’t care about my baby being dead over there and you still got his body down,” Brown said.
In an official statement from the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement obtained by HuffPost, the leaders demanded an end to the “war on black bodies”:
“While political leaders make speeches and shake hands, Black people killed by police continue to lay in the concrete streets of our communities. Every day that goes by without meaningful change, we lose another Black person to state sanctioned violence.”
Our hearts go out to Keanna Brown and the Martin family in this difficult time.
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