On Sunday, Aug. 7, Raleigh, North Carolina homeowner, Chad Copley, shot a Black partygoer— after a 911 call— from his garage claiming to be part of a non-existent neighborhood watch.
Now, the mother of 20-year-old victim, Kouren-Rodney Bernard Thomas, speaks about her son’s death on the Aug. 12 edition of the “CBS This Morning.”
The victim’s mother Simone Butler-Thomas says that her son was not a hoodlum, he went to the best schools, never lived in the projects and was a good person.
“My heart was just ripped out. Somebody just stomped on it. I felt empty,” Butler-Thomas says. “My children never, ever lived in the projects. They always went to the best schools, and had the best of everything.”
Since her son’s death, Butler-Thomas has had to speak to media on various occasions to salvage his good name.
In an Aug. 11 press conference, the grieving mother tells reporters that her son did not look like a hoodlum, did not sag his pants and was a respectable young man.
“He wasn’t dress when he left with sagging pants, or a do-rag or anything that people would call ‘hoodlums’ would wear,” she says through a stream of tears. “He asked me before he left to take a picture of him … There was nothing hood about him.”
