The Black Lives Matter movement has been posting inaccurate information regarding the officer-involved shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio. Jeryl Bier, the editor of Pluribus, first pointed out their official statement on Bryant after posting a screenshot of what they wrote and asking if anyone was interested in fact-checking this. He called the site an “online project exploring the rising tide of illiberalism and its recent progeny, cancel culture.”
The site notes that Bryant called the police for help before the incident, but that Officer Nicholas Reardon showed up and “shot this 16-year-old child point-blank within a matter of seconds.” The site reads “another “Black life stolen with no regard.”
The part that the BLM site left out is that Bryant was shot by a Columbus police officer while she was seen on video attacking a Black teenage girl with a knife. In the video, the officer takes a few steps towards a group of people in the driveway when Bryant starts swinging a knife wildly at another girl, who falls backward. The officer shouts several times for Bryant to get down, but she charges at another girl who is pinned against a car. The officer then fired four shots.
While Bryant’s mother was all over the news talking about what a sweet girl Ma’Khia was, she neglected to inform the public that she was actually living with a foster family. A neighbor that lives across the street, Donavon Brinson, caught the entire fight on his home security camera and said if the officer hadn’t done what he did, there’d be two girls dead. He described the fight as a “girl fight” and said they started off just calling each other the B-word. He said the fight escalated very fast and got extremely violent when Bryant started aiming a knife at another young lady.
Ira Graham III, another neighbor, said Bryant was in full attack mode and that he can certainly see why the police chose to stop her. “Now, whether or not less-lethal force could have been used, whether or not a Taser could have been chosen instead of a gun – I don’t know. But I do know that with Ma’Khia having that lethal weapon in her hand, she did need to be stopped,” Ira Graham III said.
Another neighbor notes that officers have a duty to protect the public and ourselves and that they have to make these kinds of decisions every day, and with the transparency that the public can see. “As unfortunate as it is, we do not know potentially how many lives could have been lost in addition or people seriously injured,” they said.
But BLM protesters and anti-police activists are arguing that they are “rushing to make excuses” because she had a knife and that the officer was not justified in using deadly force.
The radical left would rather protect the life of the attempted murderer than the life of the rescued victim. That’s where their priorities lie – and few would argue that that weren’t at least two lives there that were at serious risk.