We met because I’m writing a book about the death of her brother and two other teens in the summer of 1967. We were looking at her family photos when she came across a photo of Aubrey in the kitchen.

Aubrey “would do anything for me,” she said. “He was always there for me.”

Thelma remembered that right after he gave her the pennies, their mother, Rebecca Pollard, saw a bruise on his face.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Oh, the police came in last night and they pushed us around a little bit and hit us a few times,” Aubrey said, describing an early-morning raid on the Algiers by Detroit officers searching for stolen goods.

“Well, don’t you go back there,” his mother said. “They’ll come back and kill you."

Thelma remembered that Aubrey dismissed his mother’s warnings.

“Aw, Ma, you worry too much. Nobody is going to bother me,” he said, with the certainty of a teenager whose future seemed to stretch beyond the horizon.

“But she knew,” Thelma remembered.

Her fear was rooted in past experiences.

A mother’s fears

Her mother lived through the 1943 Detroit race riot, which left 34 dead. And Rebecca Pollard knew about the long history of racism and police violence and harassment of young black men and boys in Detroit – something her four sons experienced regularly since they were small children.

She also knew that what began as an outburst of rage and resentment against racial discrimination and economic exploitation just two days earlier on 12th Street now felt like a state-led assault against African Americans.

“They are savages,” a Detroit Free Press reporter overheard one police officer say. “Those black son-of-a bitches. I’m going to get me a couple of them before this is over.”

Forty-three people died that week. Detroit Police shot and killed 18. National Guardsmen were involved in the deaths of another 11 people, including a 4-year-old girl named Tanya Blanding whose tiny body was riddled with bullets when Guardsmen aimed a .50 caliber machine gun at her apartment building and opened fire because they mistook her uncle lighting a cigarette near a window for the flash of a sniper’s gunshot.

He started the Detroit riot. His son wrestles with the carnage.

Guardsmen dispensed an estimated 155,000 rounds of ammunition in five days. They even fired at the police. For example, when police officers shot out the city’s streetlights to avoid detection, Guardsmen stationed a block away heard the gunshots and the glass shattering and believed it was from a sniper. When the Guard returned fire, police officers then reported being under attack by snipers. Jimmy Breslin, a witty, irascible journalist, recognized the danger inherent in the chaos. “Detroit is an asylum,” he wrote in 1967.

Fear, exhaustion, anger, and despair among police — driven by the long hours and the shooting death of popular Detroit Police Officer Jerome Olshove on July 25 — added to an already volatile situation.

This is the context under which Rebecca Pollard’s maternal admonition became a bleak prophecy.

Three dead, shot at close range

Just past midnight on July 26, a flurry of Detroit Police officers, National Guardsmen, Michigan State police and a private guard stormed the Algiers Motel after hearing a report of gunfire nearby.