Tyre Nichols’s Skate Crew Reunited To Mourn Their Friend At His Memorial

Around them, the skate park quickly filled with people. Finally, more than 100 would appear at the Nichols Memorial, the 29 -year -old killed by police officers in Memphis, where he had moved in 2020. Five officers face accusations of murder. A sixth was suspended. The unity of which they were part was dissolved. The video of the brutal blows has spread, but most of the old crew of Nichols said they had tried to avoid it. Nichols joins a long list of hashtagged names that police violence made famous, but for friends who knew him for a long time, his death is not a rallying cry but acute and intimate pain.

“Some days, when I think of him, it hurts so much that I try to sleep it,” said Williams.

“I would like me to have seen him more,” said Danforth.

“When you get older, it is difficult to stay in touch sometimes,” said Alex Wilson, turning on his candle in one hand in the process to protect the breeze.

Far from the new cameras and the crowd that gather in the center of the park, the crew gathered behind a large ramp with a distant edge, placing their candles in a tight circle along its base. The arms were dragging themselves around the other, they huddled together on the flickering heat, memories rushing with a flood of nostalgia.

“This place was the best, guy,” said Ryan Wilson, looking at the ramps where he learned to skate for the first time.

“Whoever presented himself here was part of the family,” said Danforth.

Danform and Alex Wilson had been the first of the crew to move into this subdivision in Natomas, a large and flat suburb of Sacramento extending from the airport to the city center. When their families arrived in the early 2000s, most of the neighborhood, including Regency Park, was still under construction, part of a housing boom that swept the vacant meadows north of the city.

Ideally located at the intersection of highways 5 and 80 – the two main arteries of Northern California – Natomas offered easy access to the city center at an affordable price that attracted buyers of houses from all over the region and in a diverse range of class plans and ethnities.

While more and more houses were riding, more and more young families moved to fill them. Tire Nichols and his father arrived about five months after Danform and Alex Wilson. The three pre -adolescents explored their unfinished neighborhood together. Some days, they crossed the wooden frames of houses soon, trying to shoot themselves with air pistols. Most of the time, they found themselves in Regency Park, which, at the time, was only dirt fields surrounding a construction area that the workers covered with Tarp when they have timed every evening. Under the tarpaulin, a skate park took shape. Danform, Alex Wilson and Nichols were all novice skaters, and after the departure of the construction workers, they would remove the tarpaulins and test their movements on the ramps and the freshly installed rails.