Thank you to all who attended our press conference today.
[Note: Based upon interviews and collaboration and input from multiple sources in our city, we believe the following to be accurate based upon our understanding at this time. As we are volunteers, community members, and concerned human beings, we believe the overall picture of this situation emerging from these preliminary findings is of sufficient concern to warrant a demand for action.]
Situation: A mentally disabled, traumatized Black man with intellectual challenges went missing a few weeks ago in our community. He has a legal guardian, his brother, who is also Black.
The guardian brother, worried and desperate to find him, tried to make a report about his missing brother at the police station. They refused to help him, claiming that since his brother was an adult, they couldn’t take a report. The brother kept trying to locate him on his own, without any police help.
More days passed. The brother asked yet another police officer to take a report, and he refused as well. But one of the police officers told the brother that another officer had given his brother a one-way ticket to Chicago. The statement was witnessed.
The brother continued his search without any assistance nor even support from the Macomb Police Department.
A few days later, the police officer then changed his story and stated they hadn’t given him a ticket and sent him away. Frantic and traumatized, the brother, who is his guardian, finally received aid from a professional health provider who went with him to the police station to insist they finally report his brother as missing and endangered.
The Macomb P.D. finally, approximately two weeks later, filed the missing persons report, neglecting to mention in that report he was missing because they had given him a one-way ticket to a city where he has nobody to help him. The Chicago Police Department located him, sitting on a stoop, with frostbitten feet, in the same clothes he had left Macomb with two weeks prior.
The brother who is the guardian of this man not only wasn’t offered any assistance nor apology, he had to drive up to get his brother and bring him back to his home community at his own expense, with no assistance from the Macomb police, who had created this emergency in the first place through their own actions.
Chief Barker must go.
- Affidavit: Black mother from Macomb
- Affidavit: Black Woman who grew up in Macomb
- President Heather McMeekan’s Remarks
- Questions re: Treatment of two Black men in Macomb by the Macomb P.D. which resulted in one going missing and being put in harm’s way
- Video: Trauma Therapist, Candace Whitman, LCPC
- Video: Former Social Worker, Becky Danner
- Video: Questions for Mayor Inman
- Video: Next steps