More than 200 miles away from Memphis, as Tyre Nichols’s family mourned the beating death of their son at the hands of police, Sylvia Askew was at home, taking care of her ailing husband in Nashville.
Sylvia knew how Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, felt. She too struggled over the last week, just as she had every time a Black man in America was killed by police: a decade ago, on 17 January 2013, her 24-year-old son Steven Askew was shot and killed by two white Memphis police officers moments after he awoke in his car, waiting for his girlfriend outside her home.
