George Floyd… David McAtee. A second name will appear in the anger demonstrations that have swept over the United States for the past week. On the night of Sunday to Monday, David McAtee, a respected merchant from Louisville, capital of the state of Kentucky, was shot dead by police.
This 53-year-old black man operated a steakhouse restaurant, YaYa's BBQ, in the West End, one of the city's most popular neighborhoods, and was a pillar of the community. According to his mother and nephew, he was known to feed needy people and the police who stopped at his stall for free.
On the night of Sunday to Monday, as in many cities of the country, a demonstration took place in the district to denounce the police brutality. Police chief Steve Conrad said in a statement on Monday that an unidentified person had fired on police, initiating police and National Guard fire to disperse the crowd. Two police officers and two soldiers are said to have fired. McAtee collapsed at 12:15 am next to the parking lot of Dino's Food Mart supermarket, where a fire was going on.
Surprisingly, the body cameras that the police still carry with them were not turned on. Louisville mayor Greg Fischer sacked Steve Conrad after discovering that the officers involved in McAtee's death had no video of the shooting.
It is the second time that such a violation has been noted in a few weeks: on March 13, a young black woman of 26 years, Breonna Taylor, a paramedic, was shot dead in her home by eight bullets by police officers who came to make a search of his home. Neighbors said the police did not identify themselves and did not knock on the door before breaking it down, contrary to their version of the facts. Word against word, no video can decide the versions, the body cameras having been cut at the time of the facts. If the FBI opened an independent investigation, to date, the three Louisville police officers involved in the death of Breonna have not been worried by justice, to the chagrin of her family, defended by Ben Crump, the lawyer for close to Georges Floyd. This unsanctioned death remains a terrible pain for the African-American community of Louisville.