Family of Black teen killed by Columbia officer calls for federal probe, police reform
The family of a Black teen are calling his death at the hands of a Columbia Police Department officer a murder, which they want investigated by federal authorities after Richland County prosecutors dropped the case.
“Joshua Ruffin did not have to die,” said Elder James Johnson of the Racial Justice Network. “He was chased down and hunted.”
The Racial Justice Network and the family of Ruffin, a 17-year-old teenager who was killed in April, want the U.S Department of Justice and South Carolina Attorney General’s Office to open a investigations into the shooting of the teenager. Johnson and the victim’s family called the previous inquest into the shooting a “cover up.”
On April 8 about 6 p.m., Columbia police officer Kevin Davis shot Ruffin.
Davis was investigating citizens’ reports about at least one car break-in and groups of teenagers riding bikes and looking into cars in the north Columbia neighborhood of Seminary Ridge, authorities said. Davis saw Ruffin walking in the area of the investigation and after the officer repeatedly asked him to stop, Ruffin ran, police said. During the chase, police and prosecutors said Ruffin pulled a gun and pointed it Davis who pulled his own gun, fired and killed the teen.
At a news conference Tuesday outside the Richland County courthouse, members of the Racial Justice Network and Ruffin’s family, some wearing “Justice for Josh” shirts and “I am Joshua Ruffin” masks, disputed the authorities’ narrative. The family was flanked by about a dozen supporters.
Their main contention was that Ruffin never pointed a gun at Davis. Body camera footage doesn’t show Ruffin pointing the gun, Johnson said.
“If he wanted to hurt a police officer he would have shot,” Johnson said. The family believes that Ruffin pulled out his gun and dropped it to the ground to try to hide the weapon so he wouldn’t be caught with the gun by police.
In June, when 5th Circuit Solicitor Byron Gipson declined to press charges against the officer, he showed the footage from the encounter to a room of reporters. Zooming in on a granulated image, Gipson claimed that the picture showed Ruffin pointing the firearm. Gipson cited various legal reason why the officer was right to question and chase Ruffin.
A spokesperson for Columbia Police Department said “Police Chief Skip Holbrook provided factual information regarding the investigation at the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office news conference in June.”
Ruffin’s father, grandmother, aunt and two uncles spoke at the conference. The teen was a loving and cheerful kid who was close to his grandmother and wanted to go to college to make his family proud, they said.
“I don’t think the same, I don’t eat the same, I’m not the same,” Ruffin’s father, Darryl Timmons said. “I’m missing a whole part of me that’s never going to come back.”
No one disputed that that Ruffin had a gun but members of the network and family argued that the officer shouldn’t have tried to stop Ruffin because the teen wasn’t doing anything wrong. Ruffin was walking back to his home from a store, family said. He wasn’t on a bicycle as was reported about other teens to police.
“Where was the threat to the officer if Joshua was clearly running away from him?” Johnson said in a statement.
Ruffin’s family and the activists also tied the teen’s death to the series of killings of Black people across the United States by police. They asked for Rufffin’s death to be part of the catalyst for police reform and ending systemic racism.
There’s a lot the family doesn’t know about her grandson’s death, Ruffin’s grandmother, Debra Timmons, said. “We do know a change needs to happen.”
Activists, community leaders, including Uncle James Sanders, and the family want more transparency from police, such as turning over body camera footage to the public immediately after a shooting, and non-police investigations of shootings by officers.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division investigated Ruffin’s death but Johnson said he and the family had no confidence in their investigation.
The victim’s family also requested to see Ruffin’s autopsy report and were refused, according to Johnson who questioned why the family was denied if nothing is to hide.
“At what point do you stop seeing us as a boogie man and a target but as a human being?” Cecile Johnson of the Racial Justice Network said at the end of the conference.