On February 19, 2022, Baltimore Police officer Connor Murray shot and killed Donnell Rochester, a 19-year-old queer Black kid with a big fashion sense and bigger dreams (for a profile of Rochester see our story “The Brief Beautiful Life of Donnell Rochester,” and for a deep dive into the circumstances of his death, see “The Anatomy of a Police Shooting.”
Rochester was fleeing a specialized BPD unit after they ran his plate and saw he had a failure to appear warrant. Murray stepped in front of Rochester’s moving car and shot three times. Then he fell to the side and shot once more, killing Rochester.
At the time, local prosecutors prosecuted police killings instead of the attorney general, and Ivan Bates, who had just taken office, declined to charge the shooter, despite the AG’s advisory that there was probable cause. Murray and the other officers involved in the shooting are still on the force.
Since then, Rochester’s mother, Danielle Brown, and a group of supporters called the Donnell Justice Fighters have been fighting for justice for her son. But they also want to do something good for others in the community under his name, and so for the past four years have been holding “Donnell’s Day,” an event with free food, toiletries, music, and services such as HIV testing.
BPD has a bad history of suppressing Black and queer grief and showed up ten cars deep to the fourth annual Donnell’s Day in Penn North on Saturday, May 30, threatening to arrest Brown, she says, hassling people because of a lack of permits, even though the event was on private property. Still, Donnell’s Day was able to support the community, and BPD managed not to kill anyone. (Baynard Woods)
