As soon as he arrived in town, Daryl Washington drove to the mural and stared up at George Floyd’s eyes. He could not stop thinking about him — a fellow black man, a man he had never met, yet one he traveled 250 miles to see laid to rest.
But this trip wasn’t for work. He wasn’t in town collecting evidence or representing Floyd’s family. He arrived here because he felt called to Houston — Floyd’s hometown and a city, like America, grieving over the brutal image of a white officer pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck until his body went limp on the asphalt.For black people in this country, Floyd’s last words — “I can’t breathe”— served as yet another devastating reminder of the dangers of interacting with the police.
Once he started college, the traffic stops began. Sometimes the officer, while peering into the vehicle, would tell him he’d been tailing too closely behind another car. Other times the officer told Washington he matched the description of a suspicious person in the neighborhood. Do“Painful,” Washington recalls, wincing at the memory. “Very painful.”
“What happened to George Floyd has been happening to brothers all across this country,” he says, “it’s now just getting filmed.”On a recent afternoon, a few blocks from Washington’s office in downtown Dallas, plywood covered the windows of a 7-Eleven. “BLM” and “I can’t breathe” blanketed the wood. He had the TV in his office tuned to MSNBC, flashing images of protesters gathered in Detroit and Oakland and Amsterdam and London.
“Every time I take a case, I think, this could be my child,” he said. “It’s just a fact of life for black people in this country.”no-knock warrants like the one that left 26-year-old Breonna Taylor deadOn a recent muggy morning, he made the two-hour drive from Dallas to Killeen, a military town in central Texas. He’s representing the family of James Scott Reed, who was killed after Killeen police barged into his home with a no-knock warrant in February 2019.
It was 6 p.m. and he still had a two-hour drive from Killeen back to Dallas. His mind, though, was already on his next trip, to see Floyd.On Sunday, Washington arrived in Houston, to mark the moment Floyd had led him to, a time when the faces of strangers shared the same binding expression. He wanted to stop by a makeshift memorial with a mural. It was a short walk from Cuney Homes, the public housing project where Floyd grew up in the Third Ward.
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Who seeks justice for people of other races attacked and killed by black people? It's like so many cases every week but we are not supposed to mention it, only black criminals are supposed to get the headlines and sainthood for getting caught by police. Someone explain.
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