Ta’Kiya Young treated her two little boys like kings, dressing them sharply, letting them have too many sweets, cooking them big gourmet meals of T-bone steak with broccoli, cheese and rice.
The royal life also awaited her unborn daughter.
When Young found out she was pregnant with her third child — a girl — she was thrilled. The 21-year-old Ohio mom and aspiring social worker bought a stack of adorable onesies in anticipation of the baby’s arrival. She scheduled a photo shoot to show off her baby bump. She applied for public housing and looked forward to the day when she and her growing brood would have a place to call their own.
Instead, Young’s grieving family prepared for her funeral on Thursday, exactly two weeks after a police officer in the Columbus suburbs fatally shot her in her car in a supermarket parking lot.
Their Aug. 24 encounter, captured on police bodycam video released last week, was the latest in a troubling series of fatal shootings of Black adults and children by Ohio police, and followed various episodes of police brutality against Black people across the nation over the past several years. The confrontations have prompted widespread protests and demands for police reform.
Young’s family wants the officer who shot her to be immediately fired and charged in her death and the death of her unborn child. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is leading the investigation.
Ahead of Young's funeral in Columbus, her grandmother, Nadine Young, who helped raise her, recalled Ta’Kiya (tah-KEYE'-ah) as a high-spirited prankster and a popular, “fun-loving, feisty young lady" who nevertheless struggled with the sudden death of her own mother last year, and who was just beginning to find her way in life.
Now the family is focusing on Ta’Kiya’s sons, ages 6 and 3. The oldest, Ja’Kobie, talks about his mother. The youngest, Ja’Kenlie, doesn’t quite understand she’s gone.
“We just show them a whole lot of love and let them know they’ve got a little village surrounding them and loving on them,” Nadine Young, accompanied by family attorney Sean Walton, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Young said the video of Ta’Kiya’s violent death was heart-wrenching to watch, the shooting "void of any humanity or decency at all."
In the video, an officer at the driver’s side window tells Ta’Kiya she’s been accused of shoplifting and orders her out of the car, while a second officer stands in front of the car. Young protests, both officers curse at her and yell at her to get out, and Young can be heard asking them, “Are you going to shoot me?”
Seconds later, she turns the steering wheel to the right, the car rolls slowly toward the officer standing in front of it, and the officer fires his gun through the windshield.
Nadine Young said she believes her granddaughter feared for her safety.
“I believe he was a bully," she told a news conference on Wednesday, referring to the officer who shot Ta'Kiya. "He came at her like a bully, and that scared her with that baby in her stomach. She's like scared, just a man walking up to her, cussing at her, and she not really knowing why."
Walton, the family’s lawyer, said his firm is seeking the officer’s personnel file and wants to speak with people who’ve had interactions with him. He said one witness said the officer had previously arrested her 17-year-old son for jaywalking and told him “that his days were numbered,” Walton said.
He said the officer had no reason to even point his gun at Ta’Kiya, let alone fire it.
The officer “could’ve clearly just eased out of the way of that slow-moving vehicle but instead chose to shoot Ta’Kiya directly in her chest and kill her,” he said.
Before her death, Ta’Kiya Young had bounced around a bit, staying with her father in Sandusky and working as a ticket taker at Cedar Point amusement park. More recently, she’d been staying with her grandmother in the Columbus area, a few hours from Sandusky, to celebrate the family's summer birthdays and participate in a remembrance of her mother, Dan’neka Hope, who'd died a year earlier.
Ta'Kiya's mother's death had “kind of messed with her," Nadine Young said, and she urged her to get counseling. Ta’Kiya and her grandmother — both of them strong-willed — clashed at times. But their bond remained unshakable, and they spoke every day.
Despite Ta'Kiya's struggles, a bright future seemed on the horizon for her. She intended to go back to school after the birth of the baby this fall. She had her sights set on a house.
“The struggle was going to be over once she got into the house,” Nadine Young said. "Her and the kids having this nice place, knowing it was theirs, and not having to stay with other people. That was the biggest thing in the world for her. She would’ve been set.”
This week, a notification from the public housing authority came in the mail.
She'd been approved.
“That hurt me to my core,” said Nadine Young, “because she was waiting for that letter.”
