When her baby was born, Natasha Clemons hugged him and kissed him and promised to God she’d protect him from the mean world. She never laid him in a crib because she needed him close. She drove him to school because she didn’t trust bus drivers. She took him to church, taught him to mind his manners, to respect the police and do what they say.
She constantly texted his coaches and teachers when she shipped him off to college in New Mexico on a football scholarship. She wore a T-shirt that said RODNEY’S MOM on senior day and held his hand as they walked across the field. Helicopter parent? She was a backpack.
And with her college graduate back home in Sarasota, tooling around in his mother’s white Jeep Liberty with the five-star safety rating and the gospel music in the CD player, she worried.
She texted him, like she did most nights.
Come home.
Rodney Mitchell, 23, who worked at Kohl’s department store, was on his way around 9:30 p.m. on June 11, 2012, when he saw police lights in the rearview mirror. He pulled off U.S. 301 and came to a stop on Washington Court, just north of Dr. Martin Luther King Way.
The deputy getting out of the Crown Victoria behind Mitchell was the same age and also had gone to college on a football scholarship. Under different circumstances, they would’ve had a lot to talk about.
Adam Shaw had made mistakes in 2½ years with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office. He’d been disciplined for stopping minority residents for seatbelt violations then illegally searching their cars. Now he was part of Operation Armistice. Police were saturating north Sarasota to reduce crime. The black community scornfully called it Operation Amistad, after the slave ship.
Mitchell, in the Jeep with Florida tag GODANGL, was the next target.
Shaw would later say he saw Mitchell wasn’t wearing a seatbelt as the two passed on the road going opposite directions, even if it was nighttime and the Jeep had tinted windows. He would say the car didn’t stop soon enough, and that after it stopped, the driver was moving around a lot inside. He would say the driver refused to put the car into park.
What Mitchell’s 16-year-old cousin remembers from the passenger’s seat is a white cop rushing to the driver’s window and shouting: “Boy, why didn’t you stop the car?”
He remembers another officer walking to the front of the Jeep, the spotlight from his vehicle beaming through the windshield. He remembers Rodney Mitchell’s hands on the steering wheel, and Shaw ordering him to put the car into park. He remembers his unarmed cousin moving his right hand from the wheel toward the gearshift, then the flash from a muzzle, then the sound of four shots.
Pop, pop, pop, pop.
From stop to gunfire: 41 seconds.
Natasha Clemons raced to the scene when a friend called. Police would not let her go to Rodney, sprawled in the driver’s seat, wearing his seatbelt. She collapsed right there, bathed in the blue lights of the lawmen who killed her only son.
http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/florida-police-shootings/why-cops-shoot/
