“He didn’t deserve to die,” Keanna Brown, girlfriend of Antonio Martin, said outside the Missouri gas station where Martin was shot. “He was so scared, I’m telling you, he was so scared. He looked at me like ‘Baby, please jump in between and say something to save me.’”
Martin was fatally shot Tuesday after police say the 18-year-old pointed a gun at an officer at a Mobil gas station in Berkeley, which is just two miles from Ferguson. The officer had been responding to reports of a theft at the gas station when he confronted Martin and a friend. The officer fired three shots, one of which killed Martin.
Brown told the Huffington Post she arrived to the scene after her boyfriend was shot. She says it took close to 30 minutes for ambulances to arrive and responders hung up on her when she called to ask for emergency medical help. The officers would not let her comfort Martin as they awaited the arrival of emergency vehicles. She tried to tell the officer that she was Martin’s girlfriend, but he said he didn’t care.
“You can’t tell me you don’t care about my baby being dead over there and you still got his body down,” Brown said.
Martin was just with Brown earlier that day. She said the two had been at home when Martin decided to go to the gas station while Brown stayed home. After some time had gone by and Martin still hadn’t returned, Brown became worried. And rightfully so. By the time she walked down to the gas station she found her boyfriend bleeding on the concrete.
“I should’ve been there to protect him, that’s all I wanted,” Brown said. “That was my baby.”
The hashtag #AntonioMartin quickly began trending on social media and the incident sparked more protests around the country.
The founders of the Black Lives Matter movement issued a statement for an end to the “war on Black bodies.”
“While political leaders make speeches and shake hands, Black people killed by police continue to lay in the concrete streets of our communities,” the statement obtained by HuffPost read. “Every day that goes by without meaningful change, we lose another Black person to state sanctioned violence.”
