After a young black man was shot by police at a mall, a community is traumatised as the family demands answers

When gunshots were fired near a Footaction store at an upscale mall in Hoover, Alabama, Emantic Bradford Sr heard about it on the local news. After dinner on Thanksgiving, his 21-year-old son and namesake, Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr, had gone to that very mall.

So Bradford Sr, a retired Birmingham jail employee, called his son.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Then voicemail.

Though he was exhausted from a latest bout of chemotherapy, Bradford Sr called the Hoover police department in the early hours of Friday morning.

“My mind was on my baby,” he told the packed crowd of mostly African Americans at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist church on Tuesday night, just a few miles from mall.

The Hoover police department told Bradford Sr they would call him back in 10 minutes.

But no one called back.

At 3.43am, Bradford Sr called them again.

“I can’t tell you anything,” the person who answered the phone told him, transferring the call to the county, then dispatch and finally a detective on the scene.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emantic Bradford Jr was fatally shot by Birmingham, Alabama, police when they wrongly believed he was the gunman in a shopping mall shooting. Photograph: Emantic Bradford Sr/AP

Bradford Sr would, at last, get an answer to where his son was.

“He told me direct on the phone. I asked: ‘Is that my child?’ He said: ‘Yes, that’s your son.’”

At the time the family found out their son had died, the day after Thanksgiving, the mall reopened at 6am for Black Friday sales.

“I called them at 12.30[am]. My child was dead at 9[pm],” Bradford Sr said , his voice cracking, as he stood with family members and civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, staring at the crowd gathered in the church.

In that time, the city of Hoover, Hoover police and the Riverchase Galleria mall posted updates on social media and held news conferences. But no one had called the dead man’s family.

The tragic death has divided a community and the country. Police in Hoover, a suburb of Birmingham which is a city symbolic of the civil rights struggle and the fight against racial segregation, shifted the narrative multiple times about how Bradford had died. First, he was identified as the suspect in the shooting. Then they said he wasn’t the suspect but had brandished a gun. Then police backed off that claim too. The real shooter, meanwhile, remains at large.

The incident is resonant of many cases of police shootings of young black men, reinforcing a notion that they must behave differently from other races in America’s public spaces – merely to avoid being shot by law enforcement. As the late-night comic Trevor Noah noted in a passionate commentary on the case: “The second amendment is not intended for black people.”

Bradford’s death has left many people traumatised, especially those who witnessed the shooting. Rashad Billingsley, 18, an employee of the national guard, had passed two police officers at Footaction shortly after 9pm. He wanted to buy a new pair of red sneakers.

Before he could turn his attention to the shoes, he heard two gunshots, just 25ft away. Seconds later, he heard more. (He is unsure about how many.) Billingsley ushered dozens into the back hallway of the store, and helped tend to a 12-year-old girl shot in the back.

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He was one of the last to leave the mall, walking out with the older sister and grandmother of the young girl who was shot. Outside Footaction, they saw a young black man covered in blood.

“Me and her sister were walking out and she [saw] him out of her peripheral vision. She started crying … I put my arm around her so she couldn’t see the body,” he said, fiddling with his watch.

In the immediate aftermath, police did not contact Billingsley, he says. As of Tuesday Billingsley said they still had not spoken to him.

Police decisions in the wake of the shooting have come under heavy criticism. That night Hoover police captain Gregg Rector described a physical altercation, an exchange of gunfire, and the death of a suspect engaged by police officers.

By Friday morning, Hoover police would identify the dead man as “a 21-year-old male from Hueytown”.

Hours later, police released his name as the shooter – before backtracking. They accused Bradford of “brandishing” a gun – and then walked back that description. “This is not a change in the characterization of what he was doing with the gun at the time but rather an attempt to further explain it,” a city spokesperson said in an email.

Four days after Bradford’s death, in a joint release with the city of Hoover, police said the shooter “is still at large” – though they provided no description, indirectly admitting they falsely accused Bradford. They offered sympathy to the family, but did not apologize in the statement.

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The police officer involved in the shooting has yet to be identified by the city or police. “The officer is on paid administrative leave as per normal procedures in a case such as this. This officer has been employed by Hoover police department since 2017 but had several years of police experience prior to that,” the email stated.

The timeline remains unclear: officials have released contradictory narratives.

Crump, the civil rights attorney, said: “It is so troubling when you think of all the black men across America who have been killed because they moved a certain way. They have a cellphone, it was dark and they couldn’t see.”

He then listed African American shooting victims whose families he has represented: Michael Brown in Ferguson; Botham Jean in Dallas; and Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.

Crump grew visibly angry as he referenced white, male shooting suspects taken alive by police in recent years: Nikolas Cruz at Parkland this year; and Dylann Roof, who killed nine African American worshippers at a church in Charleston in 2015.

Crump said: “When it comes to [Bradford], who several witnesses say was trying to help them escape, help them get out of harm’s way, help them get to safety, police [don’t] see a good guy with a gun, he’s a black man with a gun.”

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Though the Hoover mall is private property and prohibits firearms, gun laws in Alabama are unclear. State law allows carrying a pistol on private property with a concealed weapon permit. According to Crump, multiple eyewitnesses have come forward, telling him many people inside the mall pulled out guns when the shots rang out.

Multiple vigils and protests have sprouted up, and people have demanded officials “release the video”. According to the police, all available video footage is in the possession of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) for the duration of the investigation.

Crump told the Guardian: “Nobody has seen the video and that’s the problem because they lied already to this family about proclaiming to the world, assassinating his character while assassinating this person.”

The ALEA has not responded to the Guardian’s inquiry.

On Monday night, Hoover police officers lined up in front of the station, watching a small crowd of protesters, many carrying signs eliciting deja vu of other officer-involved shooting protests. “Hoover PD believes the second amendment only applies to white civilians,” read one sign. “Black Lives Matter,” read another. “Release the videotapes,” another demanded.

Adrienne Matthews, 36, brought her six-year-old and 10-year-old to the protest. “It’s overwhelming, it’s a lot. There’s a lot of [Emantics] out here.”

A white police officer whispered to a protester: “I wish it didn’t have to be like this.”

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“We want justice for EJ,” the crowd chanted, using Bradford’s nickname.

Bradford Jr’s cousin, Taunya Bradford McDonald, turned to a police officer and asked: “Why didn’t you have the decency to go to my family and say, ‘Hey, your son was murdered?”

She asked: “Do you have any children?” The officer nodded.

She continued: “If this happened to your child, wouldn’t you want to know what happened?”

Sure, he said to her, still nodding. “I would want answers, just like you,” he began. “We’re human beings, we’re parents, we’re sons, we’re daughters,” he said.

Earlier that day, a vigil was held at Veterans Park. Many pastors spoke, but the most resounding words came from a white pastor, David Barnhart of St Junia Methodist church in Birmingham.

He said: “Systemic racism is not a black people problem. These are not problems we can help by claiming we don’t see color. These are not problems we can fix by claiming all lives matter.”

On Tuesday, five days after their son was shot, Bradford’s family received a call from Hoover police, Crump told the Guardian. The family has also received the body of their dead son, in preparation for his funeral, where the Rev Jesse Jackson will deliver the eulogy, he added.

It was all too much for Bradford’s mother. She was the last to address the crowd on Tuesday evening in Birmingham. After holding up a picture of her son, she couldn’t get past her first thought.

“Thanksgiving will never be the same,” April Pipkins began. She paused, looked at the ground, rubbed her temples, then collapsed. Faith leaders encircled her, praying as she lay on the floor.

The meeting ended and people filed out. And around the corner of the famed church, the mother of a dead young black man was helped on to a stretcher, away from the departing crowd.

Her son’s funeral is Saturday morning.