On the afternoon of April 13th, around two o’clock, Hahnah Williams, a lawyer in Atlanta, received a call from her twelve-year-old niece, who told her to come to her mother’s house right away. Hahnah could hear her mom, Chris Ann Lewis, crying in the background. The phone rang again a few minutes later, as Hahnah was putting on her shoes; it was an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He said that Hahnah’s younger brother, Matthew Zadok Williams, a self-taught investor in his thirties who lived alone and went by his middle name, had died the day before in “an officer-involved shooting.” “I thought, How?” Hahnah recalled later. “He doesn’t leave the house!” Zadok preferred solitude and rarely went anywhere. When she arrived at her mother’s house, the agent was there. Hahnah asked him where the shooting happened, and he gave her the address. “He lives there!” she exclaimed. “Did they just come and hunt him?” she recalls thinking.
The DeKalb County Police Department had issued a statement about the shooting that morning, though it did not mention Zadok by name. The statement reported that a man “aggressively wielding a knife” had “lunged at officers with the knife causing one of them to discharge their firearm” and then had “fled into a vacant residence.” He had, according to the statement, come back out and lunged at officers with the knife, again “causing an officer to discharge his firearm,” and then gone “back into the residence.”
In body-camera footage from the shooting, an officer says, “We’re here to help you,” before he fires toward the door from close range.
Hahnah did not stay long at her mother’s place. She and her mom got in the car and headed to Zadok’s house, a townhome-style duplex in a wooded subdivision near a highway, about fifteen minutes from Chris Ann’s house. On the way, Hahnah got another call, from an investigator with the DeKalb County medical examiner’s office. She put him on speakerphone, and he summarized the version of events he’d been given. The officers were responding to a 911 call, he told them. At one point, he said that “there wasn’t anything spectacular that happened” to Zadok.
“Sir, wait a minute, don’t be disrespectful,” Hahnah said. “Something spectacular did happen. My brother got killed.” She added, “He owns that apartment. He was in his own home when they killed him.”
“O.K.,” he said. “I apologize.”
Hahnah pressed him for details, but he couldn’t answer her questions, and he gave her the number for the homicide unit. Before the call ended, Chris Ann said, “I want you to know my son was a good person. Never been in trouble. He owned his home outright. Rehabbed it. The house next to him is abandoned. They probably went to the wrong door.” She went on, “My son is saved. I got a good son. He’s never been in trouble. Ever. He helped his sisters get through law school, medical school. He helped me—I was an R.N.—he helped me to retire.” She repeated, “He was a good son.”
The idea that Zadok would pull a knife on anyone made no sense to his family. He was the youngest child, and the only boy, in a family of six children. Zadok is an Old Testament name meaning righteous; his family also called him Pure of Heart, because he always seemed to assume the best in people. Hahnah couldn’t recall a single heated argument with him and told me that he’d never been in a fight, as far as she knew. Once, at Six Flags, when Zadok was a teen-ager, a security guard pulled him out of a line and frisked him as white boys his age filed past, she said. “We were so mad,” Hahnah told me. “But he said, ‘They do this randomly.’ He tried to convince us that it had nothing to do with race.”
Hahnah’s sisters include a nurse, a general contractor, a doctor, and a specialist in risk management, but Hahnah believed that Zadok was the smartest of all of them. He’d started a computer-repair business at thirteen. He drifted out of high school, eventually earning a G.E.D. at his mother’s insistence. He rarely bothered storing numbers in his phone, Hahnah said; he preferred to memorize them. He bought his house, in a complex called the Terraces, in a working-class corner of DeKalb County, for less than fifteen thousand dollars, after the 2008 financial collapse. The complex was not well maintained, but Zadok was proud of his place, which is where he spent basically all of his time—day-trading, listening to gospel music, reading about finance. “He was almost out of touch with reality, he was so focussed on the cyberworld,” Farah Bryant, his longtime girlfriend, told me. She and Zadok spoke four or five times a week for years, she said, even after breaking up, and she still imagined marrying him someday. He did well enough to buy another home, where one of his sisters has lived since being diagnosed with cancer a decade ago. For years, his sisters and mother would check in on him and bring him groceries when he asked. In 2018, he told his family that a gun was put to his head at a nearby convenience store; he stopped going to convenience stores. “His house was his sanctuary,” Hahnah told me. “His safe place. There was nothing we could do to make him leave. He was quarantined before we were all under quarantine.”
After the pandemic began, he spent even more time alone. But, on calls and in texts, he seemed like himself to his sisters and his mom. He talked about wanting to have kids one day, and about the most humane ways to deal with household pests. “Rodents and all beings should be treated equally,” he texted them in March. Later that month, Zadok invited Hahnah inside on one of her visits, which was unusual. He gave her advice on how to improve her law firm’s ranking in Internet searches, and asked her to recommend a plumber. She was careful not to wear out her welcome, she told me, hoping that he’d invite her in again on the next visit. On April 11th, she brought groceries, including some surprise fried chicken. “He smelled it and gave me the biggest smile,” she said. “And, for the first time in a long time, he hugged me.” She was vaccinated, but he was not; worried about infecting him, she pulled away. Later, she recalled that Zadok had been talking “a little slow” that morning. “I thought, Maybe he just woke up. Maybe I caught him off-guard.”
Late on the afternoon of April 13th, Hahnah and her mother joined other members of the family at the Terraces. Inside Zadok’s home, they saw blood on the floor and walls. They also noticed what looked like marks from a knife on the door handle. The condo attached to Zadok’s was being renovated by its owner, Jeffrey Dotson, who usually rented it out—it was unoccupied, and the family suspected that this was the vacant residence the police had mentioned in their initial statement, which informed early news reports of the incident. Dotson told me that, in early March, Zadok had called him to let him know about a leak in his place that could be damaging Dotson’s side, and offered to pay for any damages. “He was very proactive,” Dotson said. “A good neighbor.”
The family walked around the complex, asking neighbors what they had heard and seen. Among the people they spoke to was Jason Neal, who later told Channel 2 News in Atlanta what he’d told the Williams family, that he’d seen “a young man running from the police” who had “jumped on the rooftop, kicked in a window” and then jumped through it. Other neighbors told the Williams family that they’d seen a man with a bucket, but no knife. Zadok’s sisters had seen him with his bucket before, dealing with some kind of plumbing issue in the crawl space beneath the house. Neighbors also said that a long time passed before anyone helped Zadok. “When we interviewed witnesses,” Hahnah said, “they told us that E.M.S. did not enter the house until over an hour after the shooting.”
That evening, one of Zadok’s sisters posted a video on Instagram. The family was huddled around Chris Ann as she spoke. “My son was murdered last night by DeKalb County police,” she begins. She says that she has talked to witnesses, and calls it a case of mistaken identity. “My son happened to turn the corner with a bucket in his hand and the police started shooting at him and he ran,” she says. A state legislator named Renitta Shannon, who represents part of DeKalb County, reached out to Hahnah and offered to help.
The family also sent e-mails and made phone calls to news outlets, asking them to correct the narrative of Zadok’s story and to demand that DeKalb County release body-camera footage taken by the police who shot him. The next day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran its second story about the incident, this time including comments from Hahnah and from the family’s attorney, Mawuli Davis. Channel 2 sent an open-records request for the body-camera footage that evening, and the following day, the station received approximately three and a half hours of footage from cameras worn by the first two responding officers. The department was not obligated to release the footage, per the Georgia Open Records Act—a spokesperson told me that the department had done so in part to counter “inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading eyewitness accounts” of the incident, specifically citing the family’s Instagram video and the second Journal-Constitution story.
The Williams family went to watch the footage at department headquarters about an hour after the footage was released to Channel 2, which then aired it on the news that evening. The person who called 911, a young Black woman, had told dispatchers about “a very suspicious man who’s been lurking around the woods around my house” and then had called back, twenty minutes later, saying that the man had a knife. The knife was visible in the footage: it had a long blue blade and a short handle. Zadok didn’t appear to respond verbally when the officer addressed him on his porch or as he descended his stairs, at the officer’s insistence, which seemed strange to his family. He’d then run, briefly, with the knife in his hand, in the direction of the retreating officer, who tripped and fell and then circled back toward the house—along with Zadok, who fell toward him. Zadok had clearly spooked the officer, but the family wasn’t convinced that he had meant to attack him. Zadok quickly retreated under his house, and spent the vast majority of the encounter on the defensive, behind a door, pleading with officers who did not believe that he was inside his own home.
Davis said that the family was grateful to the police for releasing the video, and that it “changes the narrative” they had pieced together about what had happened. “They acknowledge that what they saw was their brother, their loved one, having a mental-health crisis that they had never seen before,” he said. Channel 2 aired similar comments in a follow-up story. Davis told the station that he believed the officers “acted in self-preservation mode” when they encountered Zadok outside his home, but that they should have called in standoff negotiators once he had gone inside. In its segment, Channel 2 twice played a clip of the moment when Zadok appeared to run toward the officer, and included audio of one officer saying, “Please, sir. I’m begging you. You’re a Black man. I’m a Black man. You don’t have to die today. I don’t want you to die today.” The story ended with Hahnah thanking the department for releasing the footage.
The story did not address one of the family’s lingering questions: Why had the officers left Zadok inside after firing their weapons, without rendering aid, for nearly two hours, until medical personnel were allowed in? Davis had hired a pathologist named Jackson Gates, who had examined the victims of other police shootings, to make a preliminary determination about the cause of death. Later that week, the family organized a press conference so that Gates could share his findings, and the family and Renitta Shannon could call for justice and transparency. At the event, on April 20th, Gates said that he believed that prompt medical aid would likely have saved Zadok’s life. Zadok appeared to have died from “a slow hemorrhage,” he said, caused by a gunshot wound to his shoulder. The shot seemed to have been fired down on Zadok, as he knelt on the floor behind an ottoman.
Later that day, the former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd, in Minneapolis. The Williams family had been following the trial closely. They knew that the initial police statement in that case reported that Floyd had “physically resisted officers” and “appeared to be suffering medical distress,” and did not mention Chauvin’s lethal use of force on Floyd’s neck.
Shannon told me that, five years ago, when she canvassed what would eventually become her district, its residents, the majority of whom are Black, described frustration with the police. “I had eighty-year-old Black grandmothers say they see crime happening in their neighborhoods all the time, but they don’t want to call police because they don’t want a young Black man to end up dead in their front yard,” she said. Shannon underlined that there are other Black men who have been killed by police in DeKalb County that few have heard about. “You have some cases that make national news,” she said. “But then you have other cases that the community knows about and works on. There’s so many cases that just never make it to headlines.”
In early May, I visited the Terraces with Hahnah and her family. She had Zadok’s ottoman, which he’d used to shield himself from bullets, in the back of her BMW. Chris Ann had been making visits to the house every other day. She told me the story of giving birth to Zadok in a Gary, Indiana, hospital where she was working at the time, in front of a number of her colleagues. “Everyone was shouting that it was a boy,” she said. “They knew how much I wanted a boy after having five girls.” She began to cry. “We loved Zadok. How could this happen to him? He never left the house.”
It was raining. A few nearby homes were covered in tarps. Hahnah pointed to the faint path around the porch that Zadok had left from walking the perimeter and going into the crawl space to attempt his home repairs during the past few months. Perhaps he had acted strangely in those first moments after the police arrived, his family acknowledged. But, if so, they now thought, this might have been because of the officers’ sudden appearance at his home, where so few people ever came, or because he was having trouble getting back inside the house. “He didn’t have any mental-health issues,” Farah Bryant, Zadok’s former girlfriend, told me. “The crisis came upon seeing those cops. I think the cops scared him out of his mind.”
The knife, they believed, was for whatever repairs he was attempting under the condo. Zadok’s sister Zeporah, thinking of the knife marks they’d seen on the door, suggested that Zadok had been working outside and had lost his keys. He often did, she said—she used to live close by and had kept an extra set for him. He’d probably been looking for them, seeming to wander around, when his neighbors mistook him for a vagrant and called the police, setting in motion the end of his life.
What was left of that life was now hidden behind the boards that his sisters had put up on the house to prevent further scavenging. They’d assembled a shrine on his porch; the plumbing bucket, with his gloves inside it, sat nearby, filling up with rain, which was also blowing in through the window that Zadok had kicked in as an officer tried to tase him. Of course he’d gone in through a window, Hahnah said—he was locked out.
Zadok’s mother and sisters relit the candles and talked about what they’d seen in the body-camera footage. The commanding officer’s comment about being a Black man who didn’t want Zadok to die had come to seem to Hahnah like “body-camera theatrics,” more directed at future viewers of the footage than at Zadok—who, after all, could have interpreted it as a threat. Why was the officer already suggesting that he might kill him? Because he had a knife? It was just a plumbing tool. “If this was a thirty-five-year-old white man, none of this would have happened,” Hahnah said.
The family had created a petition calling for the officers involved in the shooting to be fired. They had begun to worry about the window closing on the chance of any widespread uproar regarding Zadok’s killing, and about whether it was possible to get justice without it. “Sometimes it seems that you have to be the perfect Black victim to garner public outrage,” Hahnah said. “Well, Zadok was kneeling behind an ottoman inside his home after having an eight-second mental-health crisis outside with a knife. He did nothing to deserve to be shot inside his home.” She added, “It’s a shame that public outrage is needed to get justice when a Black person is killed by the police.”
Davis told me that he was considering filing a wrongful-death suit on behalf of the family. “The shocking reality about Black people being killed by police in America is there are so many of them happening, that the easiest to sell in the media is when it’s a white officer and a Black victim.” he said. “We have become so desensitized to these killings that everyone is looking for the Hollywood version, the most egregious. But this is as egregious, because a life was lost, and it just wasn’t captured by a teen-ager’s cell phone.”
Chris Ann swept the porch, freshened up the flowers, and cried. “In my head, I keep seeing him unable to breathe, struggling for breath, while their backs are to him outside this door,” she said. She went on, “They didn’t even check on my son. My son did nothing. He stood on his porch one day, after working on a plumbing issue, and he was shot and died. He had eggs on his stove. He had cooked eggs that morning for nothing.”
Afew days later, the Dekalb County Police Department sent me the rest of the body-camera footage—more than ten hours’ worth, all told. One of the videos begins with the voice of a woman who lived with the 911 caller describing what the two of them had seen. “He was running back and forth in front of our door,” she says to an officer. “When she was leaving,” the woman goes on, referring to the caller, “he came out into our pathway in front of our house and he had a knife in his hand. And she saw him and she kind of stopped and he saw her. He stepped towards her and then just, like, went the other way.” The officer says, “That’s him right there?” “Yeah,” the woman replies. “I think he lives there, though?” the officer says. “No,” the woman says, “no one lives there.” She says that the place is being remodelled, apparently confusing Zadok’s place for Dotson’s condo. The whole exchange lasts about a minute.
The officer then speaks to Zadok, who remains off-camera, standing on his own front porch. The officer asks Zadok if he lives there, but the camera’s microphone doesn’t catch any response. He asks Zadok to leave the property. Zadok walks down his stairs, wearing jeans and an inscrutable look under the hood of a sweatshirt. He isn’t wearing the glasses that he’s needed since the second grade. The officer asks if Zadok knows why police are on the scene. Suddenly, Zadok darts forward—with a knife now visible in his hand—and the officer trips; a second officer fires at Zadok, who stumbles, too, as he scrambles under his porch. The officers call for backup, while yelling for Zadok to drop the knife. Eventually, Zadok’s voice can be heard. “This is my property, man,” he says.
The first officer draws his gun and tells Zadok again to put down the knife. “We will shoot, man, all right?” the officer says. “We gave you ample warnings, all right?” Soon, police sirens can be heard. Zadok seems to be moving around the perimeter of the house, as the first officer speaks into his radio. “He already tried to attack me with the knife,” he says.
About nine minutes in, Zadok can be heard again. “I locked myself out,” he says. But the first officer responds dismissively: “Man, you don’t live there, man.”
More cops arrive. Zadok leaps back onto the porch and then onto a small roof, kicking in his second-story window and entering his house. An officer runs back onto the porch and tries to Taser Zadok from below, as he dives through his window above them.
Minutes later, at least four officers are outside his closed front door. The commanding officer, who later identifies himself as Sergeant Perry, can be heard putting one officer “on lethal.”
“We coming in,” a newly arrived officer says after knocking briefly. “Open the door!”
“Boss man,” Perry says more plaintively. “Please come out for us.” He asks if Zadok is O.K. “I think he said, ‘a search warrant,’ ” one officer tells the others, referring to Zadok.
Perry, in a lowered voice, says that they are past the point of a search warrant. They kick in the door. Zadok disappears behind an ottoman, and pushes the door closed. The officers kick it back open and fire a shot.
“My property, sir,” Zadok says moments later, sounding calm. They ask him to put the knife down again. “I’m defending my property,” he says. “You broke into my property, sir.” He shuts the door again. They kick the door open and try to Taser him. Perry, with a gun drawn, makes his comment about being a Black man and not wanting Zadok to die. Zadok tells Perry that the responding officer didn’t show him any I.D. at first. He adds, “Tell your guys to back up.”
The officers tell Zadok to drop the knife and open the door; he asks them to put their weapons down and to identify themselves. Perry names the officers and then, as he’s saying “We’re here to help you,” he fires three shots toward the door from close range.
None of the body cameras show Zadok doing anything to provoke the gunfire. He doesn’t become visible, much less cross the threshold of the door prior to Perry firing at him. (A spokesman for DeKalb County, when asked about this, replied, “The body-cam video does not fully capture the interaction between Mr. Williams and the officer.”) Perry orders the rest of the officers to back off.
A lieutenant James arrives on the scene and takes over as commanding officer. Perry explains to him what happened. Perry tells the lieutenant and others that Zadok was “out of his mind,” that the Taser had “no effect,” and that Zadok had been in a “vacant location.” Perry had “deëscalated,” he says, but Zadok “came again towards the door with the knife.” Perry walks to a patrol car and calls the Homicide Assaults Unit. Later, someone asks, “He lunge at you or what?” “No,” Perry responds. “He, he—I gave him the command to put the knife down. He came at the door with the knife.” He adds, “And it’s like he was coming through the doorway, is what it felt like to me, with the knife.”
James calls a member of the swat team on the phone. “We got a mess out here for you,” the officer says. The member of the swat team points out that Zadok “could be in there bleeding out,” a comment that is met with awkward laughter. “It’s gonna be an hour before we even get there,” he adds. The member of the swat team reiterates this before the call is over. “I need for you to think about this, though. Is old boy in there bleeding out? You gotta think about that. Because if you think he’s bleeding out, they’re gonna need to know who shot him.”
Less than half an hour after Perry fired four shots into Zadok’s house, a man wearing a radio and what appears to be a navy-blue uniform appears beside James. (A spokesman for DeKalb County confirmed that Fire Rescue was in the area on an unrelated call, and said that Fire Rescue policy prohibited E.M.T.s from rendering aid at a crime scene until it is deemed safe by the police department.)
“I was just trying to, you know, see what we need to do,” the man tells James. “What y’all need.”
“He’s in there bleeding,” James replies. “But he’s the only one hurt so far.”
“O.K.,” the man says. “We’ve got a medic team stationed across the street right now.” A truck can be heard honking. “Y’all got swat coming in?” the man says. “Is that what I heard?"
James nods. Then Perry interrupts and James takes a call on his radio. The man offering to help walks away.
The G.B.I. said it typically completes investigations into what it refers to as officer-involved shootings in sixty to ninety days. The G.B.I. will not make any sort of recommendation about charges or determination of wrongdoing—it will deliver a report to the district attorney in DeKalb County, who will make those decisions. According to G.B.I. records, there were at least thirty-one such incidents in DeKalb County between 2016 and mid-June of this year. These include shots fired by off-duty officers and incidents where an officer fired a gun accidentally, as well as cases like Zadok’s. Eighteen resulted in known fatalities. In none of these cases has the district attorney brought charges against the officer or officers involved. In one case, a family filed a wrongful-death suit, which has since been closed; in another, a family has threatened to do so. Though Hahnah said that her family is reserving judgment about the investigation into Zadok’s death until it is completed, she did not sound optimistic that his case would be one of the very few in which an officer is held accountable.
Davis, the family’s attorney, said that he was waiting for the district attorney’s decision regarding charges—until then, he won’t have access to the G.B.I.’s case file. But, based on the currently available facts, he believes that, should the family file a wrongful-death suit, they will have a case on at least two fronts. “No. 1,” he told me, “when the police kicked in the door, we don’t think he was a threat.” When they shot Zadok, Davis insisted, he was simply attempting to close his door again. The second issue was the delay in medical attention. “Our pathologist thinks the injury would have been survivable if he had been rendered aid,” Davis said. But the pathologist also needed to see the G.B.I.’s file and the autopsy report before he could draw a firm conclusion.
In the meantime, the Williams family continues to visit Zadok’s former home. In mid-June, almost two months to the day after Zadok was killed, Hahnah finally found his missing keys, in his house, in a dresser drawer. “I tried every last key on the ring until I found it,” she told me, referring to the one that opened her brother’s door.
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