The City of Tallahassee’s video release of events leading to, and including the shooting death of Tony McDade, is drawing outrage from his victim’s family. McDade stabbed and killed 21-year-old Malik Jackson prior to being shot and killed by an officer. Jackson’s family says they were not informed the video footage would include images of Malik as he died.
“Black victims do matter,” Abigail Jackson says in a Facebook live video posted Saturday morning, a day after body camera videos were released. “Malik was an innocent victim.”
Abigail Jackson is Malik Jackson’s aunt. She questions why the city included police body camera footage showing him dying on the ground, then later, being moved by first responders onto a stretcher.
“We wanted to remember our baby with the smile he carried daily. But now we have an image of him being carried like a sack of damn potatoes.”
Jackson says city officials told her the family would be informed ahead of the release. She says that didn’t happen. And she says Tallahassee Mayor John Dailey told her he didn’t know the footage would be included.
“For you [City of Tallahassee] to put my nephew’s body, my nephew taking his last breath for the world to see? We didn’t even get to see him take his last damn breath. But the world got to see it before me? before his mama? Before his daddy? It’s disgusting, and I’m pissed to the max,” Jackson said.
“I need answers from the city, from the state attorney, from the commissioners from the Mayor. I need answers,” she said, calling the release “disgusting.”
Local Attorney Anabelle Dias has taken issue with the video. In a Facebook post, Diaz says the Jackson family deserves the same protections afforded to other crime victims under the “Marsy’s Law” constitutional amendment which grants victims privacy. Dias says the city displayed “a lack of concern” for Jackson’s family.
“Marsy’s law should and does apply to Black Victims as well as White ones. Malik Jackson was a victim. His murder occurred at a different crime scene and had nothing to do with the justified actions of the officer who shot Tony Mcdade that day. There was zero, and I mean zero reason to include his last breath on the 33 minute video. There was not reason to show Malik Jackson’s family his body being picked up like a heavy bag and put in the back of an ambulance. However if the City felt it was so important to include it in the footage then they should have blurred the clip of Malik out just like they did the white female victim of the carjacking in the Blairstone video. The Jackson and Brown family deserve the same respect they showed the victim officer and the carjacking victim. They deserve the same protections under Marsy’s law,” Dias wrote.
The city’s release of the Holton Street shooting came along with other videos regarding the killings of Mychael Johnson and Wilbon Woodard who were also shot by police earlier this year in separate cases.
A grand jury Friday ruled the use of force in all three cases was justified.
The decision drew a protest march to the capitol led by the Tallahassee Community Action Committee. Co-founder Trish Brown says she saw the videos and disagrees with the grand jury’s conclusion.
“I believe if an officer kills someone, then the accountability should be conviction, or indicted,” Brown says. “You don’t hear about police going to jail or being prosecuted. You can’t tell me all these officers are innocent … to me, it’s a matter of saying ‘police are above the law’. Who is policing the police?”
WFSU has reached out to the city regarding the decision to include footage of Malik Jackson in its body camera release. This story will be updated with the city’s response, if or when it becomes available.
