Patrick Lyoya, the 26-year-old black man who was shot in the back of the head by a white police officer, came to the United States about eight years ago at the hand of his father as an immigrant from the Congo who was fleeing violence, this reported. Thursday the news agency
The Associated Press.
His father, Peter Lyoya, is demanding justice after the death of his eldest son, one of six he brought to live in the United States in 2014 to lead them away from the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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Patrick was himself the father of two young children.
He worked in an auto parts factory in Grand Rapids and visited his brothers on the weekends, his father told the aforementioned outlet.
"Patrick never had a problem with anyone
," Peter said through an interpreter.
Peter Lyoya holds up a photo of his son, Patrick Lyola, 26, at his home in Lansing, Michigan, on April 14, 2022. Anna Nichols/AP
On April 4, a traffic officer pulled Patrick over because the license plates did not match the registration of the car he was driving.
As seen in four videos shared by Grand Rapids police that capture the encounter between the officer and the driver from different angles, Patrick got out of his car and waited for the police officer, who has not yet been identified by authorities.
The agent asked him to get back in the car, but he did not obey.
The officer then
started pushing him toward the car and Patrick tried to run away from him.
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But the agent caught up with him and tackled him in the front yard of a house, while the passenger who was in the passenger seat with Patrick began recording the altercation.
The two struggled for a few seconds and then began to fight over an electric shock weapon or taser.
According to Grand Rapids Police Chief Eric Winstrom,
the Taser fight lasted about 90 seconds
.
The officer then tried to subdue Patrick by kneeling on his back and shot him in the back of the head with a pistol.
"I look at it as a tragedy," said Winstrom, a former high-ranking Chicago police commander who became Grand Rapids' law enforcement chief in March.
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Lawyers for the Lyoya family assured that the officer should be prosecuted and fired.
“The video shows us that this was, as his mom and dad have told us, an execution.
And there's no way to try to flip it or justify it," said prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump.
“It is an unjustifiable use of deadly force because the police turned a traffic stop into an execution.”
Peter Lyoya also asked the police to reveal the name of the officer who killed him.
He said Patrick's brothers and sisters want to know who killed him and would like to see his photo so they can identify "the person who took our loved one."
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Patrick's mother, Mrs. Dorcas, told reporters that she believed the family had arrived in a safe country when they moved to the United States after leaving the Congo.
She declared herself "shocked to see that my son was shot to death."
"He was my beloved son. You know how one loves the firstborn son," he
said through an interpreter.
On Wednesday, several hundred protesters gathered outside the Grand Rapids Police Department to decry police violence against Black people, after authorities released videos of the incident.
The demonstration remained non-violent.
