In a moving interview, Anya Slaughter says that all she wants from police is ‘the truth’ about the death of her son. But she now despairs of getting access to it

When Kendrec McDade was 14, his mother sat him down and had a conversation about what it meant to be a young black man in America. She told him he had to be careful, that even if he stayed out of trouble the colour of his skin would sometimes unfairly mark him out to the authorities. If he was ever stopped by the police, she advised him to act with caution. In an imperfect world, she said, there were those who would believe – if they saw him on the street at night – that simply because he was black and male he was up to no good.

“I taught him his rights,” says Anya Slaughter. She is sitting on a green sofa in her front room, looking at a shifting pattern of sunlight on the opposite wall. “I said to him: ‘I fear for you. I want to protect you. I want you to have better than me. I want you to have everything I had and more.’” She pauses. “Unfortunately he didn’t get it – any of it.”

On the night of 24 March 2012, McDade was shot dead in a Pasadena street in California by two police officers. He was 19, unarmed and had no criminal record. Despite a lengthy legal battle, an independent review into the officers’ actions has yet to be made public. Last month a California appeals court ruled that more than 80% of the report should be published. The police have until Tuesday to file a petition for review.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kendrec McDade with his mother Anya Slaughter and his paternal grandfather. Photograph: Barry J Holmes/The Observer

Anya Slaughter is still waiting for answers. She is a single mother to two surviving children – Alana, 13, and Keion, three, who was born the week before Kendrec died. When she was asked to identify his body, she returned to the same hospital where, seven days earlier, she had given birth to his brother.

She says, without blinking, that all she wants from the police is “the truth”.

Does she think she’ll ever get it? Slaughter gives a tired smile.

“No.” She leans forward and lifts up an edge of the rug in front of her fireplace. “They’re trying to sweep it under the rug,” she says, and then she lets it fall.

You might not have heard the name Kendrec McDade. This is the first interview his mother has given to the British media. But it’s important to know his story because of what it represents.

In some respects McDade is tragically just one of many – 219 African Americans have been killed by police in the US in 2015 alone and nationwide protests have been triggered by a slew of fatal cases played out along racial lines in recent years. In July 2014, a 43-year-old man named Eric Garner died after being placed in a chokehold by a white police officer on the pavement of Staten Island, New York. A month later Michael Brown, 18 and unarmed, was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In April this year, Freddie Gray, 25, fell into a coma while in the custody of Baltimore police and later died of injuries to his spinal cord.

What is particularly astonishing about the case of Kendrec McDade, however, is the continued efforts made by Pasadena police to ensure a report into their actions by the Office of Independent Review (OIR), a civilian oversight group, remains hidden from the public gaze.

The report consists of a fact-finding and critical review into McDade’s death and includes statements from the officers concerned. It was commissioned in the aftermath of McDade’s killing by city leaders seeking to calm community tensions. The administration promised full transparency. Instead, when the report was belatedly delivered in August 2014, it was announced that only its recommendations would be made public. There was an outcry. But the police union further argued the report fell under the category of “personnel records”, which are afforded special protection under California law.

Despite opposition to its publication, parts of the report were cited in a legal brief and were accidentally released earlier this year. They make for uncomfortable reading.

He was on his way to becoming a phenomenal young man. I was very proud of him. I cried every day for 29 months Anya Slaughter

The extracts state that the two officers involved in McDade’s death “repeatedly made tactical decisions that were not congruent with principles of officer safety” and that some of their actions were “troubling”. In spite of this, the officers remain in their jobs and have not faced any penalty for their behaviour.

McDade, on the other hand, paid with his life. His crime, according to his mother, was simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Slaughter had driven her eldest son from the family home in Azusa into Pasadena, about 25 miles away. McDade was due to spend the night with his father, from whom Slaughter had separated some years earlier. Then he was going to visit a girl he knew in a nearby apartment block on a street called Orange Grove Boulevard.

“I dropped him off,” Slaughter recalls. “And I said ‘I love you and I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He said: ‘I love you too.’”

They were the last words the two of them would exchange. Shortly before 11pm, a caller reported the theft of a backpack and laptop to the emergency services, falsely claiming to have been held up at gunpoint (the caller later admitted he lied about the firearm in order to get the police to respond more quickly).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Family and friends hold a memorial for Kendrec McDade, five days after he was killed. Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP

McDade was on Orange Grove Boulevard at around the same time as the theft occurred. The juvenile who stole the laptop was known to him. When Pasadena police officers Matthew Griffin and Jeffrey Newlen saw McDade, they believed they had one of the suspects and gave chase. McDade ran away. The officers pursued McDade through the streets in their patrol car.

Inexplicably, the police officers did not switch on their emergency lights or their siren – a decision that, according to the independent review, “has significant implications because, in Pasadena police vehicles, activating lights and siren automatically activates the in-car video camera”. As a result, there is no video footage of what happened.

Nor did they use a loudspeaker to tell McDade to stop. They did not call for back-up and they chose not to radio in the fact they were chasing a suspect they later claimed they believed to be armed. Despite later insisting they were fearful for their lives, they chose to pursue McDade into a darkened alleyway. Griffin stayed in the car while Newlen continued the chase on foot.

Again, the OIR report highlights this as an odd decision: “If there was so much concern about the vulnerable position the officers were placed in by travelling through the alleyway, then why did he [Newlen] decide to do so?”

At some point, McDade began running back towards the patrol car. Griffin, who was still at the wheel, saw him approach and claimed he believed the teenager was reaching for a weapon in the waistband of his trousers. Griffin shot him four times at close range from the window of the car. Newlen, hearing the exchange, thought McDade had opened fire on his partner and shot the suspect three times from behind. McDade fell to the ground. A witness who heard gunfire thought it was “a drug deal gone bad”.

Griffin got out of the patrol car, leaving it in gear. It rolled backwards, almost hitting McDade who lay dying on the street. The police officers bent over his prone form to handcuff him. When the paramedics arrived, McDade asked the ambulance driver: “Why did they shoot me?” He was taken to hospital, where his official time of death was recorded as five minutes past midnight.

The Pasadena police department spent two days looking for a gun and the stolen laptop. They found nothing. Cleared by investigations, the officers were handed back their badges and allowed to get back to work.

Anya Slaughter had no such easy transition back to her normal life. On the morning after her son was killed, she checked the newspapers on her iPad as usual. She read about the fatal shooting of a young man in Pasadena, but they hadn’t named the victim and the journalist had put his age at 20, rather than 19.

“I remember saying to myself: ‘They’ve killed another person’s baby,’” she says. Four hours later she had a call from Kenneth, her former partner and McDade’s father. He said Kendrec had never returned to his apartment, where he was meant to be staying that night.

Slaughter tried calling her son’s mobile phone. He didn’t pick up. McDade had been a star American football player in high school and had dreams of turning professional. She thought he might have gone to a game and forgotten to tell her.

Then Kenneth rang back: their son was dead.

“I just remember hollering and screaming, banging my head against the wall,” says Slaughter, her voice breaking. “And my neighbour came and asked me what was wrong and I was so emotional I couldn’t even tell him.”

Kendrec was her eldest son, born when she was just 18. In many ways, they grew up together: “He is why I am who I am today. He changed my life. He made me want to be a better person.”

She took her responsibilities seriously, holding down a job as an accountant and executive assistant for 15 years, applying for payday loans when money got tight and instilling in Kendrec a firm sense of discipline. It is a discipline noticeable in her two younger children, who behave impeccably and are delightful company.

Kendrec was, Slaughter says, a good child: a quick learner who gained friends easily. As he got older, the only thing she can remember telling him off about was the untidiness of his bedroom or the fact that he sometimes left his skateboard out in the hall or that he was on his PlayStation for too long on a school night.

He liked his mother’s spaghetti and had an enormous appetite, often eating for two or three (Slaughter says that if he were miraculously to reappear now in her front room, the first thing he would say is “Ma, what’s cooking?”). He was a keen athlete and a gifted football player – Slaughter has scrapbooks filled with every match scorecard, every mention of his name in the local paper. Although he wanted to turn professional, she told him he needed a back-up plan and he said he wanted to train as a lawyer.

At the time of his death, McDade had just transferred to study at Pasadena City College. He had applied for a part-time job as a landscape gardener and was due to start the following Monday.

“He was on this journey of becoming a phenomenal young man,” Slaughter says. “I was very proud of him.”

His death left her shattered: “I cried every day for 29 months.”

She had to hand over responsibility for her newborn baby to her niece because she couldn’t cope. She lost weight, her hair started to fall out, and still she visited her son’s grave every day.

“Have you ever heard of anybody getting kicked out of a graveyard?” Slaughter asks suddenly. “They kicked me out. On the 100th day [after McDade died], I was there so long that a man came up and said ‘Ma’am, you have to go, the gates closed half an hour ago.’ I said, ‘Just give me 15 minutes.’ He was nice, he gave me 20 minutes. At the end of that 20 minutes, I was lying down on the ground to keep him from seeing me. I didn’t want to have to leave. Finally he said, ‘Hey, I’m going to have to call the police.’ I would just sit there crying. I had a hard time.”

It was Kendrec’s father who suggested they seek legal advice. The couple sued the city of Pasadena and reached an out-of-court settlement. The city paid Slaughter and her attorney $850,000.

In a statement, a spokesman for the Pasadena police said they were “confident in the comprehensive and thorough investigation conducted by the Pasadena police detectives. The investigation was evaluated by two independent entities, the Los Angeles county district attorney’s office and the FBI. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office found the officers’ actions reasonable, justified and within constitutional law. The FBI reviewed the incident and investigations and determined that no further action was required on their part.”

Although the settlement did not say the Pasadena police department was at fault or that the city was liable, Slaughter is in no doubt what happened on that night three long years ago. “They assassinated my son,” she says. “And it’s seemed like a cover-up from day one.”

Her lawyer, Dale Gronemeier, is confident that most of the report will now finally be released. He believes it will be critical of both the city and the police for “breaking their promises … conducting a faulty internal investigation … and for trying to cover up those criticisms”.

“Anya Slaughter’s tenaciousness in getting the truth out will be rewarded,” Gronemeier continues. “Her fight for transparency has been a primary impetus in Pasadena for increased civilian oversight of the Pasadena police, which has been a great public service. But it is small solace for the loss of her son.”

Slaughter herself doesn’t hold out much hope. She thinks the police are going to do everything they can to stall publication of the review. Her eyes have that weary look of someone who has lived through too much to believe in the possibility of things going in her favour.

Every time she hears of another fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, she feels overwhelmed “because you see it’s a pattern. You see it’s happening over and over again.” She fiddles with a pale blue bracelet on her wrist. It is printed with Kendrec’s name and she has worn it ever since he died. “What’s it going to take for this to stop?” She does not ask the question in hope of a response. She asks it because it has no answer.