“You can stay right where you are. I pulled you over because you got illegal tint on your windows and your music was so loud that it was shaking the car. You want to worry about the wellbeing of your child, when just seconds ago, you had the music blaring with her in the backseat?” the cop spat, and that’s when you could see the anger in my dad’s face.
“Yeah, and when the music was playing loudly, she wasn’t crying. She likes it when I play music loudly like that. That’s how we vibe together. Saturday morning, and I’m just trying to take my baby to her mama to get her hair done. You ain’t got shit better to do today than to fuck with me. Plenty of cops have seen the tint on my windows and have never fucked with me about it. You on some bullshit man,”it was crazy how I watched my dad flip and get pissed just that fast. That’s how I was. It didn’t take long for me to switch up and get angry with someone.
“I’m not other cops. I don’t give a damn what other cops allowed you to get away with. Your tint on your windows are illegal, man. What a young man like you do to get an expensivecar like this anyways?” the cop switched gears, asking what he’s probably been wanting to know from the moment he approached my dad.
When he asked that, that’s what made my dad snarl, and shake his head.
“In other words, how a nigga like me can afford this car? That’s what you’re trying to ask me?”my dad questioned.
“You said it.Not me. Go ahead, and get your license and registration for me,”the cop demanded him to do it this time.
“Bitch ass ain’t got shit else to do with his fuckin time. You ain’t pull me over because my music was too loud, or my tints were too dark. You mad that my black ass is pushing a whip that cost more than your yearly salary. Puss ass cracka,”my dad was angry.
He reached over in the clove compartment, where most people would keep their documents, and right there, you heard…
“Hey. Hey, what you reaching for?”
“Hey!”
After that, multiple shots rang out. You could hear my screams in the background, and you no longer heard my dad’s voice. In the video, you could hear the cop in shock, and he repeatedly kept saying that he saw a gun.
My body froze, I quickly exited out of the video, tossing the iPad down on the table in front of me, and I sat here, rocking my body back and forth.
“Bae, what you doing?” Dolo’s deep voice snapped me out of whatever this was that I was feeling.
I just remember my mom telling me to never go looking my dad up. She made it seem like the scariest shit was on the internet of him that she didn’t want me to see. It now made all the sense in the world why she would try and keep that away from me, and my brother.
When Dolo didn’t get an answer from me, he walked over to the couch, sitting next to me. You could see the tiredness all in his eyes. There was a look of concern that rested there for me as well. I had my back leaned against the couch, knees pulled up, and I found myself rocking back and forth.
I was disturbed. That video disturbed the fuck out of me, and I could have gone the rest of my life not seeing that shit.
Dolo ended up picking my iPad up from the table in front of us, and since the screen hadn’t locked yet, he was able to place it in his lap, look at the screen, and he sighed.
“You just watched that?” he asked me. Not having the words to verbally respond back to him, so I just nodded my head.
I was glad that he read the room and didn’t play that shit again. Instead, he dropped the iPad back on the table, reached over for me, and he sat me down in his lap. For at least ten minutes, we chose to sit in silence. I wasn’t crying or anything, but I was angry. That video really did fuck me up. I could only imagine the amount of times that my mom had to see it. The way she must have felt when she received the call that her husband had been murdered. The fact that I had been in the back seat when it all went down. Talk about some damn trauma.
“You never saw it before?” Dolo eventually asked me.
“No. Since a kid, my mom used to always tell me not to search my dad up because I would find stuff online that I didn’t want to see. For years, I listened. Today marks the anniversary of his death, and I was out here looking at old videos of him on my iPad. Curiosity got the best of me, so I went looking him up. Something that I’ve never done before, and I saw the video. Dolo, that man killed my daddy for nothing. He told him to reach down in the glove compartment and grab his license and registration, and that’s what he was doing,” I shared with him.
Dolo had a look in his eyes as if he was just as angry and disgusted with this shit as I was.
“Your mama never tried to fight that shit? File some kind of lawsuit, press charges against the officer? She could have gone after the department too. She didn’t do any of those things?” Dolo asked me.
This was a conversation that him and I never really had before because any time that I would talk about my dad, I would hurry up and brush past it, not leaving too much room to discuss him.
“She told me that she tried. When I became a teenager, that’s when I started asking her more questions about him and wanting to get a better understanding of what actually happened to him. Technically, there was a gun in the glove compartment when my dad reached to get his registration. That’s the narrative that the department ran with. They said that he was reaching for the gun, instead of his documents, so to them, it was a justified shooting. My mom says that even though she wasn’t there, she knew him. She knew that he wasn’t the type to shoot a cop, especially not while he had me in the back seat,” I started, and then I took a quick pause.
“My dad wasn’t a saint. Cops already had their opinions about him. He was dealing drugs, playing his part in why the crime, and drug rate in Miami was so high, so he wasn’t someone that was worth defending anyways. Justice was never going to be something that was on the table for him. I just hate that I went, and looked at that video,” I finished.
Dolo pulled me closer to him, and he placed kisses all over my face.
“We can’t bring him back. All we can do is honor his name, and his legacy. Since it’s the anniversary of his death, I know you’re going to want to go out to the graveyard and put flowers out there for him. I’ll go with you to do that. You ain’t gotta do that shit on your own,” he let me know.
I gave him a small, faint smile, and then he eventually picked me up, and carried me back to the room.
I knew I was going to become invested with this video of my dad and want to know more. Although it disturbed me, I was going to do more research on it tomorrow. I just needed to find out who that cop was. I wanted to know if he’d ever done anything like that before. I needed to know something. I wasn’t going to drop it until I found out these things.
