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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – In late May, Andre Hill and his roommate Donyell Bryant watched in shock, along with the nation, the video of a Minneapolis policeman pressing his knee to George Floyd’s neck for minutes, so even for Floyd to plead he couldn’t breathe.
Nearly six months later, Bryant, 42, was sitting alone on the same couch in his Dublin home, on the outskirts of Columbus, watching body camera footage of police shooting and killing his friend from 22 years old.
And Reverend Al Sharpton will deliver his friend’s glowing speech at a public memorial service on Tuesday, Hill’s family said on Friday.
“I mean, it still doesn’t feel real,” said Bryant. “It just seems a little crazy.”
Columbus officer Adam Coy, who is white, shot and killed Hill, who was Black, in early December 22 as Hill emerged from a garage holding a cell phone in his left hand and his right hand obscured. He was visiting a family friend at the time.
Police had responded to a neighbor’s non-emergency complaint about stopping and starting a car outside.
“He brought me Christmas money. He didn’t do anything, ”then shouted a woman inside the house.
Coy, who had a long history of citizen complaints, was fired on December 28. for failing to activate his body camera before the confrontation and for failing to provide medical assistance to Hill.
Beyond an internal police investigation, the Ohio Attorney General, the Central Ohio U.S. Attorney, and the FBI began their own investigations into the shooting.
At the memorial service Tuesday morning at God’s First Church in Columbus, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump is expected to issue a “call to action,” according to the Hill family press release.
Family and friends remember Hill – a father and grandfather – as a devoted man to his family, an always smiling optimist and a skilled craftsman who dreamed of after years of working as a chef and restaurant manager of one day own his own restaurant.
“I consider him a man of everything,” his 27-year-old daughter, Karissa Hill said Thursday. She added: “It’s hard to say what he did because he did everything.”
Hill, 47, grew up in the Eastmoor neighborhood of Columbus, a racially mixed area on the east side of the city. He graduated in the early 1990s and obtained a certification in business management and culinary arts from Hocking College in southeastern Ohio.
Hill – “Dre” to his friends and “Big Daddy” to his three grandchildren – has worked at numerous restaurants around Columbus over the years as a chef or manager, including Buffalo Wild Wings and Popeyes, and franchises. of two small chains, Cooker Restaurant and the old bag of nails.
He was a skilled chef but loved to try out all styles of cooking.
“You name it, he does it,” said Michael Henry, 49, who attended high school with Hill and then shared an apartment. He added: “It was his passion there, cooking.
Hill later joined Henry at Airnet Systems in Columbus, a shipping company that shipped packages and mail, including overnight checks to banks. There he met Bryant, bonding over a game of chess. The two hit it off, eventually moved in together and became more brothers than roommates, said Bryant, who met his four-year-old girlfriend through Hill.
Victor Carmichael met Hill and Bryant when he also started working at Airnet Systems in the late 1990s. Carmichael, 44, was new to Columbus at the time and didn’t know anyone. Hill helped him find a community in Ohio, he said, typical of the kind of friend he was.
Hill’s penchant for chess epitomized the way he behaved, his younger brother, Alvon Williams, said, calling him out-of-the-box.
“He had a chess game spirit with life,” Williams said. “Chess is one move before your initial move, even two moves forward. And that’s what he did every day with everything he was trying to achieve.
Hill insisted her family – including her daughter and grandchildren and two sisters and brother – stay in touch, especially after a prolonged separation.
“He’s the one who made that call – ‘You’re coming in here now. I cook dinner. Let’s go, ”said his sister Michelle Hairston, 45.
Last year, the coronavirus pandemic forced Hill to take a break from his dream of owning a restaurant, and he began working in building and renovating homes to help support his family. He worked in Ohio as a subcontractor, his sister Shawna Barnett said.
On the day of his death, Hill had assembled his own team to do independent contracts, a goal he had been working towards since March, Bryant said.
That Tuesday, Hill borrowed a coworker’s truck he was planning to buy and parked it outside his friend’s house.
Under the sweater he wore as he walked out of the garage and slowly walked towards the police, he was wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt calling for justice for George Floyd.
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Farnoush Amiri is a member of the Associated Press / Report for America Statehouse News Initiative corps. Report for America is a national, nonprofit service program that places reporters in local newsrooms to report on secret issues.
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