“He didn’t deserve to be shot. I called for help. I didn’t call for a murder,” said Hope Coleman. She had called for an ambulance to come to her Boston home to take her mentally ill, 31-year-old son Terrence to a hospital on Oct. 30, 2016, but police who arrived shot him dead. Officers alleged that he came at them and EMTs with a knife.
She broke into tears as she recounted her son’s death, speaking to a crowd of around 300 people who’d gathered at Codman Commons in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood for Mass Action Against Police Brutality’s MLK Day March for Justice this afternoon.
When she followed the ambulance to the hospital that October day, she said, “They said he was shot in the groin and the abdomen. I know that’s the artery and you’re gone. They said he died on the way to the hospital. … My son was the quiet type. He was a mama’s boy. … He didn’t bother anybody. He needs justice.”
“We believe in Hope,” the crowd chanted in support.
“He wasn’t stupid. He needed help. I called for help and they killed him,” Hope Coleman said. “If I’d know that, I wouldn’t have called.”
Other mothers of men killed by Boston police also spoke. The march headed up Washington Street to Dorchester District Court, where they rallied again.
“People say ‘Why are you out here?’ Police aren’t getting indicted. And if they’re getting indicted, they’re getting off,” Brock Satter of Mass Action Against Police Brutality told the crowd before they set off. And, he said, “We’re here to talk about mass incarceration. It’s not about law. It’s about social control. It’s the new Jim Crow.”
