On Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the U.S. Capitol was raided by an angry mob of Trump supporters, Mr. Otieno wrote on Facebook about “two justices in America, one for us and one for the white folks.”
Mr. Mehretab said that, like his own parents, his friend Ivor had gradually come to learn of his new country’s entrenched racial injustices, a lesson that was not clear from overseas. “One thing they have realized is, like, you won’t be trusted, they’ll take someone else’s word over your word here,” Mr. Mehretab said. “They understand the system itself is sort of against African Americans.”
As the years went by, Mr. Otieno and his mother learned to live with his mental illness. There were long stretches of stability, Ms. Ouko said, when he was taking his medication and seeing his doctor. But there were flare-ups, too — times when Ms. Ouko would take him to a hospital, and Mr. Otieno would need to be restrained.
“He said to me, ‘Mama, why do they have to tie me to a bed?’” she remembered.
Sometimes these episodes happened when he was with her at home, in a quiet subdivision of single-family houses outside Richmond. The police would come, along with a medical team, she said; they would take him to the hospital, where he would be treated.
According to the Henrico County police, that is more or less what happened on the afternoon of March 2, when they responded to a call from a neighbor about a “suspicious situation,” only to be reassured by Mr. Otieno and his family that it was a mental health problem, not a criminal matter.
Campbell Robertson and Christine Hauser
Source link
