Trust in police and our justice system is a tenuous thing right now.
We’ve seen it strained all over the country – Minnesota with two high-profile in-custody Black deaths, Virginia with a brutal assault on a Black and Latino Army officer, Chicago with the fatal shooting of a Black 13-year-old who stopped running from police and was shot with his empty hands in the air, and now – possibly in Knoxville where a 17-year-old magnet school student was shot by officers in a school bathroom.
The Knoxville student, Anthony J. Thompson, Jr., is said to have had a gun. In fact, he was – immediately after he was killed – said to have used that gun to shoot a school resource officer.
Now we know that wasn’t true.
The bullet that struck the Knoxville officer at the city’s Austin-East Magnet High School was not fired from the gun of the teenage student who was killed when at least four officers confronted the teen in the bathroom, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.