La Marque, Texas

Protesting the Police Murder of Joshua Feast

December 14, 2020 | revcom.us

 

From a reader:

On the night of Wednesday, December 9, Joshua Feast, a 22-year-old Black man, was shot in the back and killed by a pig from the La Marque, Texas, Police Department (LMPD). KTRK news reported that a neighbor said she saw Feast talking to his child’s mother. She and Feast chatted a bit, and then she asked him to move his car and went inside her home. The news report continued that an uncle of Feast’s said that right then a police car driving down the street made a sudden U-turn and pulled up to where Feast was—and a cop inside yelled Feast’s name, then shot him in the back. The neighbor said when she heard the shot, she ran “to my bedroom window and I heard the officer tell him, ‘Put your hands up where I can see them!’ But (Feast) was already shot. After (he) was shot, (the cop) said put your hands where I can see them.... I came outside and overheard the officer saying, ‘Talk to me, Josh. Talk to me, talk to me.’ As if he sees him fading away without trying to render aid or at least help him.”

A press conference held the next day by LMPD chief Kirk Jackson acknowledged that his pigs had killed a Black man but did not state his age or name. Reading from his prepared script, Jackson stated, “We have reason to believe the individual was armed. There were firearms recovered at the scene.” He offered no evidence of how many guns were supposedly found, whose guns they were, whether Feast had a gun on him, or whether he supposedly resisted police in any way. Jackson refused to answer questions about whether the pig who shot Feast, Jose Santos, feared for his life at any point, and would not respond when questioned about witness accounts that Feast was shot in the back while running away.

On Saturday, December 12, about 150 angry protesters—overwhelmingly Black and young—took to the streets of La Marque to demand justice for Joshua Feast. Along with a caravan of about two dozen cars, the marchers went to the police station, where they called for firing Santos (now on “administrative leave”) and Jackson. Almost all the protesters got a copy of Refuse Fascism’s Pledge to the People of the World, and about 30 got copies of Bob Avakian’s pamphlet Donald Trump—GENOCIDAL RACIST.

Police brutality and murder are nothing new in this small Gulf Coast town. One young man who took the mic at a rally in front of the police department addressed the targeting of Black male youths. He described three people, including Joshua Feast, between the ages of 18 and 22 whose lives were cut down by police in the last few years in that area. A group of young men and women wore T shirts emblazoned with a big red stop sign, containing the words, “Stop Killing Us!” Santos is particularly vicious—he killed Gregory Ham, a 62-year-old white man, in 2017, and Newsone reported that Feast’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, released a video from an incident in 2013 with Santos beating and holding a young Black man’s head underwater despite his repeated pleas of “I can’t breathe.”

One man told the Houston Chronicle, “You cannot expect people to sit idly by and take it. This isn’t us being violent, this is us being tired of not fighting back.” The epidemic of police murdering Black, Latinx, and Native American youths continues across this white supremacist country.

How many more will die? How much longer will this go on?

Joshua Feast