Community members of a town in the Mississippi Delta are demanding answers and accountability from police after an officer responding to a domestic disturbance shot an 11-year-old boy in the chest.
An Indianola police officer shot Aderrien Murry after police were called to his home early Saturday morning to handle a domestic situation.
According to the boy’s mother, Nakala Murry, she instructed her son, Aderrien, to call the police because the father of another one of her children arrived at her home “irate” at 4 a.m. Murry said that once an officer arrived, he already had his gun drawn and asked those inside the house to come out. Murry also said the responding officers were beating and kicking on the door.
While complying with the officer’s orders, Murry said the officer fired a shot from the outside of the house as her son came around the corner of a hallway in the living room.
The boy suffered a collapsed lung, fractured ribs and a lacerated liver, and was sent to the hospital for treatment. He had to be placed on a ventilator, but was released from the hospital on Wednesday, May 24. Murry’s daughter and 3-year-old nephew were inside the home at the time of the shooting, she said.
“His words to me were, ‘Why did he shoot me? What did I do wrong?’ Then he just started crying,” Murry said in a May 22 press conference. “He ran to me. He was bleeding. I held him. I held his wound. He bled out the mouth. Every time I close my eyes, I see it.”
Now the family is calling for body-camera footage to be released, a response from Indianola police chief Ronald Sampson, and for the responding officer, Greg Capers, to be fired.
CNN reports that the family’s attorney, Carlos Moore, filed a request with police to release the footage, but was denied due to “an ongoing investigation.”
Moore confirmed that the Indianola Board of Alderman voted to place Capers on paid administrative leave. Moore is calling on the Sunflower County district attorney to investigate this case and present it to a grand jury for possible criminal charges.
“This man not only deserves to be terminated, but he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Moore said during the press conference.
According to Mississippi Today, Moore noted that Capers is responsible for one other instance of misconduct that affected another one of his clients. Moore said Capers has not yet been penalized for tasing Kelvin Franklin in December 2022 while Franklin was in handcuffs.
“This cannot keep happening. This is not okay. If a non-police officer was to shoot somebody, it’s not okay. When the police do it, they know protocol. He was trained. He know what to do,” Murry said.
“If you’re scared, you’re in the wrong field. If that’s what caused you to shoot, you’re in the wrong field. My baby almost lost his life,” she continued. “He don’t understand. I don’t understand. You’re here to protect and serve us. If that’s the case, we didn’t feel protected. We felt like victims. I feel like it could have been me.”
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is “currently assessing this critical incident and gathering evidence.”
Once its investigation is complete, the agency will turn over its findings to the state attorney general’s office.
Police reportedly told Murry that her daughter’s father was taken into custody later in the day on Saturday. He was eventually released because she had not filed a police report against him.
“When was I going to have time to do that? I was in the hospital with my son,” Murry said of his release.
Indianola is a city located in the Mississippi Delta that’s located more than 100 miles north of Jackson, Mississippi. More than 82 percent of the population is Black, and about 16 percent is white. Nearly 31 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
