Plans to remove a street-corner memorial to Daunte Wright have been put on hold, after protests from the family of the 20-year old Black man who was killed by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop last year.
“If they want to not have memorials on their street corners they need to stop murdering our loved ones on street corners,” said Wright’s mother, Katie Wright.
The announcement of the plan to remove the memorial in Brooklyn Center, a city near Minneapolis, came nearly a month after a former police officer, Kim Potter, was sentenced to 24 months in prison for manslaughter.
Potter killed Wright after he was stopped for minor traffic violations. She said she grabbed her gun and fired in error, thinking she was holding her stun gun.
The killing prompted widespread protests, as one of many high-profile cases involving Black victims of white police officers in cities across the US.
At sentencing, the judge, Regina Chu, said Potter was a “respected officer” who was “acting in the line of duty” when she shot and killed Wright.
In response, Wright’s father, Aubrey Wright, broke down in tears and said: “I feel cheated. I feel hurt. I’m upset that my son’s life was taken, and it seemed to me nobody even cared enough.”
On Friday, a month before the first anniversary of Wright’s death, Brooklyn Center officials said a memorial erected at the intersection where Wright was killed would be taken down.
In an email, the city manager, Reggie Edwards, wrote that authorities “anticipate[d] reopening the sidewalk/trail at 63rd and Kathrene early next week”, and mentioned several options about preserving memorial material.
Edwards said the city could store the material, which includes flowers and posters, or ask volunteers if they wanted to archive them.
But in an interview with the Star Tribune newspaper on Sunday, Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, said: “Leave the memorial because it’s honestly not hurting anybody but it will hurt a lot of people taking it down.”
She and her husband, along with the family’s attorney, Jeff Storms, were due to meet Edwards and the city attorney, Troy Gilchrist, on Tuesday.
In an email to the family and memorial volunteers, Edwards said Brooklyn Center was “committed to developing a permanent memorial in memory of Daunte”.
However, according to Katie Wright, locations proposed by officials were not at the intersection where her son was killed and instead included a nearby park and the police station.
Katie Wright said: “As a family, we want people to remember what happened there. I don’t want it to go away. Once it goes away, it’s forgotten about, it didn’t happen.
“It’s so easy for history to be erased when it’s not right in front of our faces.”
