By NAN Staff Writer
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. June 10, 2020: The sister of a Caribbean immigrant shot by a cop in his own home in 2018 was among mourners saying adieu to George Floyd in Houston, Texas Tuesday.
Allisa Charles-Findley, who heads up the foundation named after her brother, St. Lucian immigrant and 2016 Harding graduate, Botham Shem Jean, was among the families who have lost loved ones to police killings at the funeral yesterday.
Charles-Findley was among those recognized by Rev. Al Sharpton from the podium as he delivered a call for justice in his eulogy for Floyd and an end to the police brutality and racism that has plagued black Americans for hundreds of years.
Sharpton said there is an “intentional neglect” in the U.S. toward punishing people who kill black Americans.
“If four black cops had done to one white what was done to George,” Sharpton suggested, they would be sent to jail without hesitation.
He also honored families attending the funeral service who had relatives killed during interactions with police. These included families of Eric Garner, who was choked to death in New York in 2014; Michael Brown, shot dead in Ferguson, Mo., also in 2014; Botham Jean, who was shot dead in his apartment by an off-duty officer in Dallas in 2018; and Pamela Turner, who was killed outside her apartment by a Baytown, Texas, police officer in 2019.
Sharpton also recognized the mother of Trayvon Martin, whose son was shot and killed in 2012 by neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla., and the father of Ahmaud Arbery, whose son was killed in Glynn County, Ga., in February. One of the three white men accused in Arbery’s killing is a retired law enforcement officer.
Speaking outside the at The Fountain of Praise church in Houston where public visitation for Floyd took place Monday, Charles-Findley said: “We’re in this fight until the end.”
Jean, 26, was shot dead by Dallas cop Amber Guyger in his apartment on Sept. 6, 2018.
Floyd, a bouncer who had lost his job because of the coronavirus outbreak, was seized by police after being accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. He was pinned to the pavement for what prosecutors say was 8 minutes, 46 seconds — a number that has since become a rallying cry among protesters. Floyd, 46, was buried next to his mother.
Meanwhile, a petition by a 28-year-old White man to rename the auditorium of Harding University in Searcy, Ark., after the Caribbean-born alumnus shot by police, has so far garnered almost 17,000 of its 25,000 signatures.
Jean’s sister told The Christian Chronicle, she hopes the petition drive succeeds.
“I think it is fitting that Botham is remembered with such a symbol since Harding University played a part in the outstanding person he was,” Charles-Findley, president of the Botham Jean Foundation, a charity formed in her brother’s memory, told the paper. “I deeply hope this petition goes a long way and materializes into the Botham Jean Auditorium.”
The university’s Black Student Association has voiced support for the petition at a Christian university where minority students comprise about 15 percent of its total enrollment of 4,900.
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