A journalist who was shot in the eye by Minneapolis police while covering the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd has entered hospice care due to her injury, signalling that she is dying from her wounds.
Linda Tirado, 42, “is at life’s end and receiving palliative care”, the National Press Club said in a statement last week.
Tirado was photographing demonstrations during the 2020 unrest in Minneapolis when a police officer shot a projectile at her face. Tirado, who was wearing protective goggles and press credentials, suffered a traumatic brain injury and was blinded in one eye.
“I was lining up a photo when I felt my face explode,” she wrote in an NBC op-ed. “My goggles came off and my face was suddenly burning and leaking liquid, the gas mixing with the blood.
“I threw up my arms and started screaming ‘Press, I’m press,’ although I’m not sure if anyone could hear me with my breathing apparatus and the general chaos around me,” she wrote.
Tirado sued the Minneapolis police department and was awarded $600,000 in 2022 as part of a broader settlement between the city and people assaulted by police during the 2020 protests.
The funds addressed her medical debt, but not the long-lasting impacts on her work and life. Tirado was unable to work or earn an income after the incident.
“There is no [appropriate] amount. Because you know what I want? I want my left eye back,” Tirado told the Guardian last year. “You don’t recover from something like this. That’s not a thing you do.”
A friend of Tirado’s, Noah Berlatsky, said her condition had been deteriorating slowly and that she was dying. “She still has some lucid moments, but they’re becoming more infrequent,” he wrote on his Substack.
Tirado wrote that she was “getting ready to die” in a 13 June post on her Substack. “I don’t feel lucky, or unlucky. I feel like the sweeping notes in the Flower Song, the Nessun Dorma, anything that Vivaldi ever wrote.
“I feel nothing but joy and peace and pain and fear, all of it all at once so that it bleeds into itself and can only be described as emotion raw and pure and beautiful and perfect, and also fleeting,” she wrote.
The Minneapolis police department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
