So many of our communities are boiling and burning right now. For days, I have struggled to know what to say about this, but felt that I would indeed want to share some form of comment with my loved ones. While I have certainly not known what it was like to be targeted by police for the color of my skin, when my brother was killed by a police officer serving a warrant more than 18 years ago, I became part of a group I would have never imagined belonging to.

As a surviving family member of a loved one who died in those kinds of circumstances, I know many levels of pain and anger. My heart, therefore, completely and thoroughly goes out to any family walking down a similar, or an even more difficult, pathway to this kind of loss. My brother, who was a drug addict, was awoken by police forcing their way into our grandmother’s house to serve a narcotics warrant. He was asleep, stood up from his bed, the officer in question said he thought my brother had a gun and shot him three times in the chest. My brother was then handcuffed while he finished bleeding to death so that the officers could search his bedroom for a gun- and based on my remembrance of the DPS investigation into the shooting, no gun was to be found in that room of the house. No officers were fired, no charges were given, and DPS ruled it a “justifiable homicide.”

And sometimes, to this day, reports about the shooting by that county state that my brother actually had a gun and refused to put it down- which was not the case as I understand it. My grandmother also remembered seeing nothing in my brother’s hands as she was being drug out of the house during the shooting. So I have felt the anger and pain of loosing a loved one to what I consider to have been unnecessary police force- and in doing so, having experienced more cover-up than justice.

My brother was not a perfectly saintly man, and I will never claim that he was. But… I did love him and the way he died was devastating and, in my opinion, completely unnecessary. What I wanted, what my grandmother wanted, was for my brother to get help and turn his life in a direction away from addiction. So many people looked at him and felt like he had earned what happened to him because of his addictions. I can never repay my grandmother’s neighbors for the different stories they shared after his death, acts of kindness he performed for them such as coming over in the middle of the night when pipes had burst and helping to clean and make repairs.

Some of you know me well enough to know that there’s a great deal more I could say about our family’s experiences during that time, but what is happening in our communities right now is not really about me or my brother.

I think it is important for each of us to recognize that minority communities in our country find this type of event to be a much more common experience. That is definitely not OK. And yet, I think there is more than racism that needs to be addressed. I think our communities deserve to have their local police departments stop sheltering officers from legal consequences in these types of situations. Police officers should be held to the same standard of the law as other citizens.

I also think it is important to say there are some amazing police officers out there who are making sacrifices every day to protect our community, and doing so without using excessive force or discriminatory practices. I think we also need to recognize that policing is a very difficult job. We are asking these officers to constantly put themselves in situations where their lives are in danger to help keep peace and order in our communities.

I understand the desire and need for protests, but I cannot support members of any group taking advantage of those protests to destroy property or hurt others. And while I personally have some very strong feelings about how some of the reporting was done during my brother’s death, I also cannot agree with the attacks against members of the media trying to cover these protests. The media has served an important role in educating the public about abuses of power, and stifling their ability to do so will only take us down a path away from democracy. And when it comes to the reporting on my brother, the elements that impacted me most negatively were inaccuracies given to the media by the police department involved, so I don’t actually view the media as having been the source of those particular pieces of misinformation.

I think we all need to really, truly look at one another and see our shared humanity. I think we need to listen to one another, we need to speak to one another with respect, and I think some things definitely need to change so that our communities can move towards healing.