Just weeks after being awarded an honorary Pulitzer Prize for documenting the murder of George Floyd, a recording that was seen around the world and helped to reignite a new wave of the Civil Rights Movement in America, Darnella Frazier has suffered another terrible blow at the hands of the Minneapolis police department.
CNN’s Omar Jimenez and Carma Hassan have reported that Frazier’s uncle, Leneal Lamont Frazier, was killed in a car crash involving Minneapolis police.
According to CNN, the incident occurred when an on-duty Minneapolis police officer attempted to pull over a suspected carjacked vehicle linked to several robberies. When the officer flashed his lights, the driver sped away. The officer raced after the vehicle in pursuit, but as he darted through an intersection, he accidentally collided with another obstructing vehicle — the car driven by Darnella Frazier’s uncle.
“The officer and the driver of the westbound vehicle were taken to the hospital where the driver died and the ‘officer was treated for serious but non-life-threatening injuries,’” Jimenez and Hassan reported.
In a social media post recounting the incident, Frazier said she was “so hurt” by her uncle’s death.
“Nothing feels real. … Minneapolis police [have] cost my whole family a big loss,” Frazier wrote. “Today has been a day full of heartbreak and sadness. … It’s not fair how the police can just go around killing people. You took an innocent life trying to catch someone else.”
https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie/posts/1759633094237789
In a subsequent post, Frazier also wrote, “the police made a bad decision by doing a high-speed chase on a residential road. That bad decision cost my uncle his life. The police car is the car that killed my uncle. Accident or not, he’s gone. Everyone made it out alive, BUT my uncle. It hurts different[ly] because he had NOTHING to do with this. He was [just] on his way home.”
Spokespeople for the Minneapolis Police Department have not announced the name of the officer involved in the collision. According to Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokesman Bruce Gordon, the Minnesota State Patrol is leading the investigation and will turn its findings over to the county attorney for final review.
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