The Police Officer Had His Gun on My Face
One of my closest friends recently shared a story with me, in a letter dated March 25, 2021. In the letter, he described his first police encounter in the U.S. in 1995, when he was 19 years old, less than a month after he arrived in the U.S. from Mexico to work. This morning as I read the news about the murder of 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop, my friend’s story weighed on me, so I am sharing it here, just as he told it. He so easily could have been senselessly killed like Mr. Wright. And for what?
At the time of the incident described here, my friend was new to this country and did not yet realize how dangerous he was in the eyes of law enforcement just by virtue of the color of his skin. It did not even occur to him that the police suspected he was concealing a weapon. I could share here stories of the times my white friends or I were stopped for driving erratically or speeding when we were in our teens or early 20s. Of how we were always given the benefit of the doubt. Of how the worst thing that ever happened to any of us was that we received a little lecture and a ticket. But these experiences are understood and need no reiteration.
This system, which routinely claims the lives of Black and Brown people during traffic stops and other everyday encounters, is not protective. It is dangerous. And if a system harms any of us, it harms all of us. It scares me. I am scared for people I love. What must parents of Black children feel? What is it like to be the mother of a young Black man? How much can people take?
I’m sharing my friend’s story of his police encounter, because these stories need to be known. It needs to be understood by EVERYONE that the deaths of Philando Castile and Daunte Wright and too many others are not anomalies. So here is a testimony from someone who survived his terrifying police encounter. From someone who has been through so much in the 26 years since this encounter that he FORGOT about this until recently. Let that sink in.
Here is his memory:
I forgot to tell you a story. It is sort of crazy that I had forgotten, maybe because I don’t speak much about my past with anyone other than you. In those first couple of weeks when I got my first job and I was fresh in the U.S., something kind of crazy happened. I was working in the Outback Steakhouse restaurant. I had only been in IL for a couple of weeks. A guy who worked in the same restaurant had gotten me the job, and we lived in the same apartment then. Well, we were coming back from work late one night around 1:00 or 2:00am. He was driving his car, and, of course, I was in the passenger seat. I had a couple of new hats that the restaurant had given me as part of the uniform. It was cold, like October or November. I had a denim jacket with me. I don’t wear hats — I would only use them at work if I had to — but they gave me a couple to have. I put them inside my jean jacket, in an inner pocket.
It was late, and it took 30 to 45 minutes to get from the restaurant to our apartment. We had to go on an expressway and through the suburbs. I was sort of falling asleep in my seat. As my friend was driving and about to go across a wide intersection, the traffic light went from green to yellow. So he pushed the brakes, and the front of the car was over the white line where cars are supposed to stop. My friend quickly reversed the car and moved behind the line. He didn’t want to cross the intersection while the light was yellow. He was a very careful driver.
On one of the street corners, there was a convenience store, I think a 7–11. And this police car came flying out of the parking lot and right at us with its lights and sirens on. And I have no idea where the other police cars came from, but in less than a second, we had two other police cars on our sides with their bright car lights all over us. They stepped out so fast with their flashlights. That woke me up so fast, but I had no idea what to do, or what was going on.
The officers were speaking in English, when suddenly the one police officer on my side pulled out his gun and drew it on me. My friend yelled out to me in Spanish, “Don’t move! Don’t move! Don’t do anything!” He spoke English and Spanish. I had no idea — none — what was going on. But the police officer had his gun on my face. My friend began to interpret for me. The officer wanted me to keep my hands up where he could see them and did not want me to move. There were guns surrounding us now.
I was like, “What — what!?” in Spanish. Then my friend said that the police wanted to see and know what I had inside my denim jacket! I replied to my friend in Spanish that I had nothing. But the police officer kept screaming things.
My friend said, “What is it? What’s inside your jean jacket?”
I said, “I only have two hats, I have hats! Why? Why?” So my friend interpreted for the police. They told my friend to tell me to open up my jacket slowly, and so I did. The thing was that the one police officer had seen something but couldn’t tell what it was, even though he had his and everyone else’s flashlights all over me and my friend. By then, I don’t know where more police cars came from, but we were surrounded by police cars and lights.
Finally, as I opened my jacket where the officer closest to me could see that I had hats inside my jacket, he relaxed. He told me to pull them out, and he saw that they were only hats.
He asked (and my friend interpreted), “Why do you have those inside your jacket?”
I said, “Because I want to. Why?” I didn’t want to carry them in my hands.
They all relaxed and put their guns away. They questioned my friend about where we were coming from and where we were going and what we were doing. They asked my friend for his driver’s license. He was all legit and good. They didn’t ask anything else about me. My friend explained that we were coming home from work. They saw we had our work uniforms and that my friend was clean. He explained that he didn’t want to cross the intersection during a yellow light and decided to break and stop until the green light. They let us go.
But everything was so fast and crazy. Honestly, my mind was blank at that moment. I had no idea what the hell was happening, or why. It didn’t make any sense to me at all. And I had forgotten all about this until now, which is crazy.
