Tyre Nichols’s stepfather has said the officers charged with murdering his son are “monsters” who beat him like a “piñata”.
Rodney Wells added that the five policemen had “disgraced their families” but he and his wife would pray for them as well as their son.
Mr Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, died after police from the Memphis, Tennessee, Police department (MPD) punched, kicked and pepper sprayed him following a traffic stop on 7 January. He was unarmed.
Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr, Emmitt Martin III and Justin Smith have all been sacked and charged with murder.
Speaking to MSNBC on Saturday, Mr Wells described his son, who he worked with, as a “sweetheart” who had a “very infectious personality”.
When asked what he would say to the five officers, who were also Black, Mr Wells said: “As my wife said, we pray for them too — their families — because they’ve disgraced their families.”
“These was monsters that did this to my son,” he added. “My son weighed 150lbs - each one of these officers was over 200lbs. That’s 1,000 lbs beating on my son, using him as a pinnata”.
Amid growing unrest and protests against the killing, MPD on Saturday announced that it has disbanded the unit that the accused officers belonged to.
The so-called Scorpion special unit, which had around 50 officers, was tasked with reducing crime in the city.
But in a statement on Saturday, Cerelyn ‘CJ’ Davis, Memphis police director, said it is in the “best interests of all to permanently deactivate” it.
In harrowing bodycam footage of the incident released last week following demands by the family, Mr Nichols, a father of one, could be heard calling out for his mother as the officers assaults him.
“I was hitting him with straight haymakers, dog” says one officer. Another is heard to say: “I jumped in, started rocking him.”
His mother, RowVaughan Wells, in a separate interview with MSNBC, said she hated “the fact that it was five black men that actually did this to another Black man”.
She vowed “not to stop” until every person responsible for her son’s killer is “prosecuted to the fullest of the law”.
In another interview, Ms Wells said that the officers who beat her son to a “pulp” had brought shame “on their own families and the Black community”.
“People don’t know what those five police officers did to our family. And they really don’t know what they did to their own families. They have put their own families in harm’s way,” she said.
“They have brought shame to their own families. They brought shame to the Black community. I just feel sorry for them. I really do. Because they didn’t have to do this.”
