72 new york | july 8–21, 2019
Bradford family. One TV crew shows up.
With grim faces, Bradford’s parents tell the
camera their story—the police “vilified” their
son’s character on TV and didn’t admit they
shot the wrong man until the next night. But
Crump’s statement is what makes the news.
“The video will be the same today as it was
on November 22, the night E.J. was killed,”
he says. “And the same as it will be at the
time of trial, unless somebody alters it. The
video is the video is the video.”
Afterward, Bradford’s parents meet
Crump in another hotel lobby. “They
didn’t even cover him up,” E.J. Sr. fumes.
“They kept him laying out there like a
piece of meat.”
“Like he didn’t belong to anyone,” says
Bradford’s mother, April Pipkins.
“Like didn’t nobody love this child.”
The hatred they saw on social media
enrages them too. “Somebody said, ‘All he
did was rob and steal.’ My son is dead, and
you posting this stuff on Facebook?”
“Say he shot somebody’s house.”
“Say he was a thug.”
Taken in isolation, the death of their son
had a familiar Rorschach-test quality. Shots
rang out in the mall in Hoover, the richest
and whitest suburb of Birmingham. Two
people were wounded, and the policeman
saw him with a gun in his hand and made
what some people would consider the obvi-
ous assumption. This argument enrages
E.J. Sr., who was a policeman himself for 20
years. The officer who killed his son didn’t
shout “Police!” or “Drop the gun!” He pulled
the trigger five seconds after the first burst
of gunfire. “That’s not a justifiable shooting,”
he says. “Especially when your first shot is
in his head and, as they’re falling, you put
two more in them.”
The police didn’t even call them to say
their son was dead. The AG hasn’t talked
to them once. He refuses to release the
name of the officer who fired the shots.
And the mall reopened the next day. E.J.
Sr. glances at the black faces around the
table. “But Hoover’s got their own set of
rules, as we all know.” he says, his voice
dripping with bitter fury.A
fter the meeting, Crump’s
office calls. A storm front is heading
south, one so large the airport
might have to close. Instead of can-
celing his meeting in Little Rock and hun-
kering down in a nice hotel, Crump recruits
the nearest person with a car. He wants to
drive to Atlanta and catch a plane there.
On the way out of town, he remembers he
hasn’t eaten and spots a Chick-fil-A. In the
parking lot a few minutes later, he prays
over his takeout bag: “Dear God, please
watch over E.J. Bradford and Stephon Clark
and ...” Eight or ten names later, he wrapsup with a personal request: “Lord, please
put an angel on every corner of this car.”
On the highway, he returns to his obses-
sions: There’s no way the Alabama AG is
going to bring charges against that police
officer, he says. He knows it, Bradford’s
parents know it, anybody who’s black in
America knows it. He’s unyielding on this
point. When I tell him that if I were a cop
who saw a kid running through a crowded
mall with a gun in his hand seconds after a
shooting, I probably would have shot him
too, he fires off an indignant rebuttal.
Police officers killed Tamir Rice within sec-
onds of seeing him with a gun, just like
Bradford, then we find out he was 12 years
old and the gun was just a toy, and they still
get off. Dylann Roof goes into a black
church and kills nine people, and they
bring him Burger King. Latandra Elling-
ton wrote a note to her aunt saying a prison
guard threatened to “beat me to death and
mess me like a dog,” the aunt called the
prison, and ten days later they found
Latandra dead in her cell—
His phone rings. It’s one of his agents in
Hollywood. “Hey, Cam, I heard you had an
awesome trip,” he begins, schmoozing the
guy like he was born in the William Morris
mail room. Then he gets down to business.
“Netflix said 350, but we can’t say the deal
isn’t exclusive ...”
Hanging up, he launches back into his
litany of wrongful deaths. He won’t debate
the specifics of each case. To him, the real
problem is the “default assumption” that
the black person might be guilty. If you
consider the radical racial disparity in drug
convictions in America, his point is unas-
sailable. But if you look at the specifics of
each crime, the Rorschach test kicks in—is
this particular police officer guilty? His
phone rings again. This time, it’s his PR
person, calling about the press release for
“Banking While Black,” which might go
out on Thursday. “I want to be sly about
how we put it out,” he tells her. “I’m wor-
ried they’ll drop the charges when they
find out I’m involved.”
When he hangs up, he tells me about a
call he just got from a new pair of grieving
parents. Their son was a college student in
Maryland. His name was Richard Collins.
He was a week away from graduating. The
leaders of his ROTC program called him “a
model cadet,” “a young man who did every-
thing he was supposed to do.” He was stand-
ing at a bus stop when a student named
Sean Urbanski allegedly came up and
stabbed him in the chest. The police later
found out he was a member of a Facebook
group called Alt-Reich Nation. One of his
classmates posted, “Fuck yeah, Sean!!!!!
That’s what happens when niggers get
frosty with an OG!”They start with the Stephon Clark case
in Sacramento. “What do you want to put
in the press release?” Carruthers asks.
“I want to keep it real simple,” Crump
says. “There’s a video that shows they killed
him when he was running away, they let
him lie on the ground—no first aid, no effort
to save his life—and what I always tell the
families: We can’t control what the DA does
in criminal court, but we can hold the city
of Sacramento accountable in civil court.”
He’s feeling good about Birmingham. Yes,
the attorney general took the Bradford case
out of the hands of the black district attorney
and black mayor, whose city has a majority-
black population. And yes, this is the same
attorney general who once sued the previous
black mayor for covering a Confederate
monument. And yes, the AG is still refusing
to release videos of Bradford’s killing, claim-
ing they don’t tell the whole story. But
Crump sees hope in that. In the Laquan
McDonald case in Chicago, the DA kept the
video under wraps for more than a year
because one look was enough to tell you the
officer was guilty of coldblooded murder—
he shot a 17-year-old 16 times while he was
walking away. If the AG keeps stonewalling,
and Crump raises enough of a public outcry,
he might get the video the DA in Birming-
ham showed him of the killer fist-bumping
with his partner over E.J.’s body. That would
go viral for sure, and he’d filed a lawsuit to
get it released.
As the meeting ends, Crump brings up a
new case. Just a few months ago, a woman
came up to him after a speech and said, “I
know Trayvon was big, but this is going to be
your biggest case. Can you meet with me for
30 minutes?” It turned out her great-great-
great-grandfather, a first-generation slave,
had been photographed by a Harvard pro-
fessor who was trying to prove that pure-
blooded Africans are biologically inferior,
closer to apes than human beings—this was
in 1850. She wanted those pictures. Harvard
refused to give them to her. And Harvard
had used the photographs in discussions
about universities’ facing their history with
slavery—can you believe that?
monday morning, Crump flies to Bir-
mingham for his press conference with the
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21Black
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