Tawanda Jones speaks about her brother Tyrone West on July 18 in Baltimore at an event marking the 10th anniversary of his death at the hands of police officers. (Minh Connors/The Washington Post)
BALTIMORE — Tawanda Jones’s big brother looks just as she remembers him in the faded photo she has carried to so many protests.
Flashing a broad smile and sporting shoulder-length locs, on this July day he hangs from the microphone stand over bold black letters: “STRANGLED DURING RESTRAINT. Baltimore Enough is Enough.”
It was here that Tyrone West died, at the corner of Kitmore and Kelway roads in Baltimore, during an exchange with city police officers who had pulled him over for allegedly backing out too slowly into an intersection.
It happened in 2013, five days after the Black Lives Matter movement formed in response to a Florida jury’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Cellphone footage was not yet ubiquitous. There was no body-camera footage — the technology would not become widely used until after the 2014 death of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Mo. And while some of the facts of West’s death matched those of others whose names captured national attention in the years that followed, he never got it — even in a city that erupted not two years later over the police-involved death of Freddie Gray.
Jones, a petite mother of four, has been unable to bring herself to visit her brother’s grave, which is placed above her mother’s. But she has refused to let his in-custody death fade from public view, notching several legal and policy wins in an enduring fight for a criminal investigation that only now seems like a possibility.
This year’s milestone for West also marks a decade that Jones, a prekindergarten teacher, has crusaded against police brutality and an American justice system that she says lacks accountability. She takes aim at in-custody deaths during weekly pop-up protests across the city, decrying violence anywhere but especially in Baltimore, a place with a long history of police corruption and racial discrimination.
By mid-December, Jones has organized 543 events she calls West Wednesdays, in honor of her brother. She moved them online during the pandemic, but otherwise, she can be found outside on Wednesday nights, sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter as she shouts her message to anyone willing to listen.
“She’s front and center at the struggle for justice for survivors of police violence in Baltimore and in Maryland,” said Sonia Kumar, a senior attorney at the ACLU of Maryland. “It’s not just about the victory. It’s also about the struggle and the effort to get justice . . . And I think to the extent that Baltimore has influenced the national landscape, she’s a huge part of that.”
It has cost her. A warrior to some and inspiration to families shattered by similar deaths, Jones has also been dismissed by some elected officials in Baltimore as a nuisance and disrupter.
“She’s so courageous to continue to fight all these years,” said LaToya Holley, whose brother, Anton Black, was killed during an encounter with police on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 2018.
“It’s very draining. It’s very time-consuming. It drains your energy and your mind because you’re always putting yourself in that place. It’s hard to move forward when you’re still fighting to try to see someone — anyone — to take you seriously about your loss, your pain, and what kind of individual your family was,” Holley said.
Jones has lost time with her family, money from her savings and peace as she endures a spotlight she wants shined only on the final minutes of her brother’s life.
She has no plans of stopping.
This year, the city’s top prosecutor, Ivan J. Bates, and the state’s top law enforcement official, Anthony G. Brown, have agreed that her brother’s case is worth review. Neither has committed to reopening it.
Jones had a sense of foreboding after leaving church the morning after the Zimmerman verdict.
Toward the end of the message, Bishop Orlando Wilson implored the congregants of New Antioch Church — including West — to “be careful out there ... Seems like Black lives don’t matter.”
Four days later, West was dead.
At first, the medical examiner’s office tied his death to a bad heart and dehydration — not the lacerations and wounds found across his body and documented in 2013.
“I was like ‘oh no, you’re not going to do this to my brother,’ ” Jones said. Weeks after her brother’s death she planted herself outside the coroner’s office at one of her first West Wednesdays, “urging the world to watch.”
The office was then headed by David Fowler, who years later would testify as an expert witness for the defense of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was on trial in the killing of George Floyd. Today, about a hundred in-custody deaths involving police restraint that were handled by Fowler’s office during his 17-year tenure are under review.
Former city prosecutor Gregg L. Bernstein cited the office’s report in declining to charge the officers involved in 2014. So Jones spent $50,000 of her savings to have her brother’s body exhumed for an independent autopsy, which found West died of asphyxiation while being restrained.
“I couldn’t wait to go on my own pursuit,” she said in an interview, through tears. “Because in my mind, I’m like, it’s never over. I’m not going to stop until these killer cops are in cell blocks. I don’t care how many years it takes. I don’t care. I’m going to keep going at it.”
The same year, she and her family opened another front in their push for accountability, with a wrongful-death lawsuit that laid out their findings.
About a week before a scheduled court appearance in 2017, Jones and her family were summoned to a settlement hearing.
Jones was sitting across from her attorney with a pen in her hand when someone mentioned a nondisparagement clause.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
The clause would prohibit her from mentioning the names of the officers who were involved in her brother’s death during West Wednesdays, they said.
She dropped the pen to the table and walked away, removing her name from the civil suit to reserve her right to protest without jeopardizing the $1 million settlement for her nieces and nephews.
Jones said West, an artist who loved to draw, was a father who never met many of his grandchildren.
Months after the settlement, Jones joined Ashley Overbey Underwood, a Baltimore City woman who lost her settlement with Baltimore police in a misconduct case because she violated the gag rule, to change the city law.
They met with the ACLU, who took Underwood’s case, and testified at hearings at city hall where they sat with tape over their mouths in a sign of protest.
Two years later, the law was changed.
Over the last decade, Jones has become a fixture at city hall and at citywide town halls, calling out elected officials and chiefs of police for corruption and misconduct. She has lobbied against the city’s choice for police chief and protested against efforts to shield police records.
“Things don’t happen overnight, not as fast as we want them to,” Jones said.
Two former prosecutors in Baltimore refused to file charges in West’s death, basing their decision on the official autopsy that found West died of cardiac arrhythmia from cardiac conduction system abnormality complicated by dehydration during police restraint.
But earlier this year, Bates, with six months in office, gave Jones more hope than she’d had in 10 years.
Bates said in a letter that the case merited a review.
“It put into words that something is not right, and that meant the world to me,” Jones said of Bates’s determination.
Bates met with Jones several times and she shared additional information “that I believe warrants a new investigation into this incident,” Bates said in a letter to Brown.
He asked the attorney general’s office to launch an investigation. He also wrote a letter to State Prosecutor Charlton T. Howard III suggesting that his office, which investigates misconduct of public officials, look into whether there was any perjury or other misconduct involved in the case. Bates said in the letters that he had a “personal conflict” that kept him from pursuing the case. As it turns out, a Bates spokesman later said, a top member of his team is a close relative of one of the officers involved in the case.
Police at the time said that when West was told to get out of the car, they saw a bulge in his sock that they suspected was drugs, which would have been a violation of his parole, and a chase and altercation ensued. They said West was combative. But they also acknowledged in court documents that they threw punches and used batons and pepper spray. In his letter to Brown, Bates cited new autopsy results that contradict the findings in the 2013 report and depositions provided by Jones that indicated that there were no drugs found at the scene or on materials tested.
Jones’s “sisters,” former strangers who have lost loved ones and often join her for West Wednesdays, said Jones has for years provided evidence to prosecutors and other elected officials who typically dismiss her.
“She says stuff and people look at her like she’s got three heads with a big ol’ eyeball in the middle of her forehead and it’s actually the truth,” said Angela Sutton, whose brother, Timothy Flemings, died after a police interaction. “Everybody knows there are state’s attorneys in bed, literally in bed, with police officers. So the whole system is screwed up.”
Whenever Jones learns of an in-custody death in Maryland she tries to reach out to a loved one.
Sometimes it’s a direct message on social media that leads to a phone call. It’s how she connected with Holley, Anton Black’s sister, and Nikki Owens, the cousin of William Green, who was shot six times by a police officer while handcuffed in the front of a patrol car.
Earlier this month, Jones began her 541st West Wednesday with “sad news” she learned moments before arriving.
A jury had acquitted former Prince George’s police officer Michael Owen Jr. in Green’s death.
“He got into a car accident, he hit several cars, nothing that warranted a death sentence,” Jones told the three people in front of her, one of them recording a Facebook Live. “I’m beyond disappointed. I’m heartbroken. It’s disgusting.”
Jones called to the microphone a White retired teacher and a loyal member of the West Coalition who went to the court with other members of Jones’s group to support Owens and the rest of his family.
“It’s outrageous that this jury made the decision . . . I think the guilty party here is the legal system in P.G. County just like the legal system in the rest of the country,” said Bill Bleich, who blamed the outcome on a weak prosecution.
Jones said police in many cases, particularly in her brother’s, will change the narrative to criminalize the victim and to attempt to justify their actions.
“Dead people do not talk, let’s be crystal clear and when these killer cops murder our loved ones then they try to be our loved one’s voice,” she said.
She said police said they saw a bulge in her brother’s socks when he sat down on the curb. When she saw her brother earlier in the day he was wearing shorts and ankle socks, she said.
“So they can’t even lie straight,” she said. “To make up that absurd lie. To say he said, ‘You’re going to lock me up for these measly drugs.’ I never in the 44 years of my brother’s life at the time he was executed, never heard my brother use the word measly.”
Sometimes, she is tired. But the protests can be healing, she said.
“It’s therapeutic for me because I actually get to actually uplift my brother’s voice and name in a positive way. And if I’m angry and I want to press on the microphone or whatever or cry or whatever I want to do, I can let it out and I’m not holding that in,” she said.
Jones often ends West Wednesdays soliciting prayer. She said her faith is what has sustained her through the pain.
Asking for strength as she continues her journey, Jones paused after announcing the news about the acquittal on Dec. 6, and closed her tear-filled eyes. “If you are into prayer, say a prayer. If not, that’s OK,” she said. “We need positivity because all victims don’t die.”
