Tyre Nichols: Bodycam footage shows father-of-one calling for his mother as he is beaten by officers before his death
Memphis Police has released bodycam footage showing the moment Tyre Nichols called for his mother as he was beaten by five officers before he died.
The footage shows police savagely beating the 29-year-old FedEx worker for three minutes while screaming profanities at him throughout the attack.
Police have released four separate videos cut into one hour-long clip.
Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis told reporters it was from “three different streams”.
She said: “It’s three different sources: body-worn camera, an actual source right there at the scene where the most physical you know abuse occurred and then two other body-worn cameras from the officers at that same scene.”
Ms Davis had earlier asked for calm before the video footage was made public.
“I expect you to feel what the Nichols family feels,” she said. “I expect you to feel outrage in the disregard of basic human rights.”
In the footage, one camera shows the initial police stop at an intersection in Memphis, Tennessee.
“I’m going to baton the (expletive) out you,” one officer can be heard saying. His body camera shows him raise his baton while at least one other officer holds Mr Nichols.
After the first officer roughly pulls Mr Nichols out of his car, the FedEx worker can be heard saying, “I didn’t do anything,” as a group of officers begins to wrestle him to the ground.
“Get on the ground!,” one officer yells, as another is heard yelling: “Tase him! Tase him!”
Tyre Nichols is seen beaten by police officers in video released by Memphis Police Department
Mr Nichols calmly replied soon after being wrestled to the pavement: “OK, I’m on the ground.”
Moments later, as the officers continue to yell, Mr Nichols says: “Man, I am on the ground.”
An officer yells: “Put your hands behind your back before I break your (expletive).”
Moments later, an officer yells: “(Expletive), put your hands behind your back before I break them.”
“You guys are really doing a lot right now,” Mr Nichols says loudly to the officers. “I’m just trying to go home.”
“Stop, I’m not doing anything,” he yells moment later.
The camera is briefly obscured and then Mr Nichols can be seen running as an officer fires a Taser at him. The officers then start chasing Mr Nichols.
After the beating, officers milled about for several minutes while Mr Nichols lay propped up against the car, then slumped onto the street.
In footage from one of the cameras Mr Nichols is heard shouting for his mother while police attack him.
The father-of-one is then pepper sprayed and punched in the face.
Tyre Nichols
Ms Davis said the officers were “already ramped up, at about a 10” during the initial stop.
She added the officers were “aggressive, loud, using profane language and probably scared Mr Nichols from the very beginning”.
“We know something happened prior to this officer or these officers getting out of their vehicles… just knowing the nature of officers, it takes something to get them amped up, you know, like that. We don’t know what happened,” she said.
“All we know is the amount of force that was applied in this situation was over the top.”
She also described the officers’ actions as “heinous, reckless and inhumane,” and said that her department has been unable to substantiate the reckless driving allegation that prompted the stop.
Protests have erupted in at least nine cities across the US in the hours since the bodycam footage was released.
Mr Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, had earlier warned supporters of the “horrific” nature of the video but pleaded for peace saying “tearing up the streets” is “not what my son stood for”.
Demonstrations are taking place in Sacramento in California, Washington DC, Atlanta in Georgia, Boston in Massachusetts, New York, Asheville in North Carolina, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and Providence in Rhode Island.
Protests are also taking place in Memphis, Tennessee, where Mr Nichols was attacked.
Police in New York City have made at least three arrests at a protest near Times Square.
One arrest was for damage to a police car, a second was for punching a police officer and a third was for an undisclosed reason, a police captain told NBC News.
Police are also documenting any damage to other vehicles as protesters weave through cars. They also confiscated bikes from protesters who were trying to prevent arrests from being made.
Given the likelihood of protests, Ms Davis had told ABC that she and other local officials decided it would be best to release the video later in the day, after schools were dismissed and people were home from work.
Clockwise from top left: Officers Demetrius Haley, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin III, Tadarrius Bean and Desmond Mills Jr have been sacked. Pic: Shelby County Sheriff’s Office
New York Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, said he and other mayors across the country had been briefed by the White House in advance of the video’s release, which he said would “trigger pain and sadness in many of us. It will make us angry”.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said he was “appalled” by the video and that all FBI field officers have been alerted to work with state and local partners, including in Memphis, “in the event of something getting out of hand”.
US President Joe Biden said in a statement after the footage was released: “Like so many, I was outraged and deeply pained to see the horrific video of the beating that resulted in Tyre Nichols’ death. It is yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that black and brown Americans experience every single day.
“My heart goes out to Tyre Nichols’ family and to Americans in Memphis and across the country who are grieving this tremendously painful loss.”
He added: “Violence is never acceptable; it is illegal and destructive. I join Mr Nichols’ family in calling for peaceful protest.”
Mr Biden also said he spoke with Mr Nichols’ mother and stepfather.
He continued: “There are no words to describe the heartbreak and grief of losing a beloved child and young father. Nothing can bring Mr Nichols back to his family and the Memphis community. But Mr and Mrs Wells, Mr Nichols’ son, and his whole family deserve a swift, full, and transparent investigation.”
Before it was made public, Mr Nichols’ family said the “very horrific” footage showed officers savagely beating the FedEx worker for three minutes in an assault their lawyers likened to the Los Angeles police attack on motorist Rodney King in 1991.
Five sacked officers, who are all black, have been charged with second-degree murder and other crimes, including assault, kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression, over Mr Nichols’ death.
They are named Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr, Emmitt Martin III, Tadarrius Bean and Justin Smith.
Martin’s lawyer, William Massey, and Mills’ lawyer, Blake Ballin, said their clients would plead not guilty. Lawyers for Smith, Bean and Haley could not be reached.
A painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust has become the most expensive piece of modern art and the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction.
The Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, was bought for $236.4m (£180m) by an unnamed buyer after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday.
Its sale price beat the previous record for 20th-century art set by Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe bought for $195m (£148m) in 2022.
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn by Andy Warhol. Pic: Associated Press
The most expensive painting ever sold at auction was Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which fetched $450m (£342m) in 2017, Christie’s said on its website.
Sotheby’s said on X the price for the Klimt was “astonishing”, making the piece “the most valuable work of modern art ever sold at auction”.
The portrait, which Klimt worked on between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families wearing an East Asian emperor’s cloak.
Evaded fire and Nazi looters
Measuring 1.8m (6ft), the colourful piece, which was completed in 1916, illustrates the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.
It was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in a fire at an Austrian castle.
It also escaped being looted by the Nazis, who plundered the Lederer art collection.
They left only the family portraits, which they held to be “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan.
Father lie saved her life
To save her own life, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father.
It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait.
She convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from Klimt, which allowed her to live safely in Vienna until her death from illness in 1944.
The painting, which is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned, was part of the collection of billionaire Leonard A Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire, who died this year.
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Five Klimt pieces from Lauder’s collection sold at the auction for a total of $392m (£298m), which also included pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch, Sotheby’s said.
An 18-carat-gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan – the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall – sold for a reported $12.1m (£9.2m).
The fully-functioning toilet, one of two he created in 2016 satirising superwealth, was stolen while on display at Blenheim Palace, the country manor where Winston Churchill was born, in 2019.
Two men were convicted of the theft, but it’s unclear what they did with the loo.
Investigators believe it was likely broken up and melted down.
A single loose wire on the container ship that crashed into and partially destroyed a US road bridge, led to the vessel losing of power just before the fatal collision, investigators have concluded.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has found that the unconnected electric cable meant the Dali experienced a loss of propulsion and steering less than a mile from Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.
The collision on 26 March 2024 that followed collapsed a span of the bridge and killed six construction workers who were unable to escape in time.
It led to the blockage of the mouth of one of America’s busiest ports for almost three months.
Investigators found that an improperly placed label on the wire prevented it from being fully inserted, causing an inadequate connection.
The NTSB’s chair said locating the loose wire was like trying to find a single loose rivet on the Eiffel Tower.
The board has praised the ship’s crew. “The crew’s actions were as timely as they could be, and they were appropriate and also impressive considering the circumstance,” board member Michael Graham said.
But he called on the maritime shipping industry to strengthen its safety systems and better manage risks to bring it into line with the rigorous approach taken in aviation.
“Many of these issues we have discussed today as part of this accident could have been identified, addressed, and either mitigated or eliminated,” Mr Graham said.
The far reaching consequences of the accident are continuing. State officials have more than doubled the projected cost of the bridge rebuild from an upper estimate of $1.9bn (£1.4bn) to $5.2bn (£3.9bn) – with the reopening date pushed back to late 2030.
The Baltimore bridge collapse. Pic: Reuters
How to prevent future tragedies
In March, the board called for urgent safety assessments of 68 bridges in 19 US states including famous crossings like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.
The organisation found that countermeasures to reduce the vulnerability of the bridge from ships could have been implemented if a vulnerability assessment had been conducted by the Maryland Transportation Authority
The board has now issued numerous recommendations to try to prevent future catastrophic collisions.
Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after its collapse in 2024
Major bridges should consider adopting motorist warning systems that can immediately stop motorists from entering bridges in an emergency.
The Baltimore bridge, like many others, was not equipped with a warning system to prevent vehicles entering.
But police managed to clear and halt traffic on the bridge before the collapse, despite only having about 90 seconds to do so.
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Drone view of the Dali after it crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Pic: Reuters/NTSB
If traffic had not been stopped, it is likely that the death toll would have been much higher.
Police officers were discussing how to best evacuate the six workers who were on the bridge moments before the entire structure collapsed.
Other recommendations include the periodic inspections of high-voltage switchboards and proposed changes that would allow ships to recover faster from a loss of power.
In a joint statement, Grace Ocean (the Dali’s manager) and Synergy Marine Group (the Dali’s operator) thanked the NTSB for its investigation and stressed that they had fully cooperated with the board.
It said: “Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine Group continue to extend their deepest sympathy to all those affected by the Francis Scott Key Bridge incident of 26 March 2024.
“Since the outset, Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine have fully cooperated with the Board, making personnel, records and technical information available as requested.
“We note the Board’s findings, including its observations regarding the vulnerability of the Key Bridge’s main support pier, as well as the comments relating to aspects of the vessel’s electrical arrangements. These matters will be reviewed in detail with our technical teams, the vessel owner and counsel.”
The NTSB also called on Hyundai Heavy – the company that built the Dali – to incorporate “proper wire-label banding installation methods”.
In response the company said that when it delivered the ship “there was no indication that any wire was loose”.
It added that if any wire were to come loose “over the course of a decade, through vibrations or otherwise, the owner and operator should have detected that in a routine inspection and through normal maintenance”.
Synergy Marine Group has been approached for a response to Hyundai Heavy’s comments.
The NTSB has not specified that the power outage caused the crash. A probable cause for the crash will be decided at a later date.
The FBI is conducting a criminal probe into the collapse.
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