Jarrell Garris, 37 Photo: via Twitter
On July 3, Jarrell Garris, a 37-year-old Black man, was shot by police in New Rochelle, just north of New York City. The bullet to the neck fatally injured Garris, and he died in the hospital a week later. Jarrell Garris’s “crime,” for which he had to pay with his life, according to the murdering pigs? He allegedly ate a banana and a few grapes at the New Rochelle Farms market and walked out without paying.
Jarrell Garris had grown up in New Rochelle and had recently moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. His family said he was back in town to take his son to Greensboro for the summer. According to one news report, Jarrell’s father, Raymond, said, “Garris struggled with mental health issues, including schizophrenia, and had been contacted by New Rochelle police when he was a city resident for wellness checks.”
Partial police body cam footage that has been released show Jarrell Garris walking away from cops and trying to cross the street outside the store. Did these pigs try to find out what was going on with this man and if he needed help, see if he was having a mental health crisis, and move to calm things down? No—just like pigs across the country have done and continue to do time and time again in situations involving people with possible mental health issues, the New Rochelle cops quickly escalated the situation with hostile actions and words. They moved to handcuff Jarrell, and one cop yelled “tase him!” These cops were not there to “serve and protect” but to brutalize and use deadly force to enforce this system’s “law and order.”
Jarrell Garris had grown up near the scene of the shooting, a historically Black neighborhood known as the Lincoln Avenue corridor. His sister, Tiona Garris, speaking to how the police are trying to justify the killing by bringing up Jarrell’s past record, said, “I don’t want to remember him by how they try to paint a picture of him. He had a heart of gold. He was a respectful person who just had a mental illness."
What kind of a system has “officers of the law” that wantonly take a person’s life for eating some pieces of food without paying or suffering from a mental crisis? A system that needs to be swept away as soon as possible through an actual revolution and replaced with a fundamentally different system that opens up a whole new way to live. As revolutionary leader Bob Avakian pointedly asked in his 2012 talk BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!, speaking about the repeated murders by police and other horrors under this system of capitalism-imperialism: “How Long?! How Many More Times Do the Tears Have to Flow?”