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Community Leaders Help Keep North Toledo Neighborhood Calm
in Wake of Deadly Shooting
Sojourner’s Truth Staff
In the aftermath of the
deadly shooting on Friday evening at the corner of Lagrange
and Hudson in north Toledo, several community leaders took
an active part in engaging a crowd of about 200 and helping
to keep the peace on a summer’s night that could have been
explosive.
Chief among those speaking
with both the police and the crowd were Earl Mack, former
police officer, member of the Toledo Police Citizens’
Advisory Board and president of the area Buffalo Soldiers;
Christopher McBrayer, chaplain at the Toledo Correctional
Institute and Toledo City Councilman Larry Sykes.
The tensions were a result
of the shooting by Toledo Police officers of Lamar
Richardson, a suspect in a number of convenience store
robberies. Richardson who was being followed by police
officers reportedly ran away, first in a car, then on bike,
finally on foot. When he “produced a weapon,” officers fired
and hit him three times, once in the head. He died on the
spot and his body lay uncovered for some time, much to the
anger of many in the crowd, until Chief George Kral arrived
and ordered the body covered.
As certain members of the
crowd began to become agitated to the point of increasing
the overall tension, community leaders reached out
individually and kept those tensions from boiling over.
That evening, Mayor Wade
Kapszukiewicz called together African-American pastors and
convened a press conference late at night. A cruiser’s
camera video was released within hours of the shooting.
“Something went wrong in
Ferguson [MO], something went wrong in Baltimore; something
went right in Toledo in the midst of a tragedy, in the midst
of the passion,” said Kapszukiewicz at the news conference.
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