COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – In late May, Andre Hill and his roommate Donyell Bryant watched in shock, along with the nation, a video of a Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee to George Floyd’s neck for minutes, while Floyd claimed that he couldn’t breathe.
Almost six months later, Bryant, 42, was sitting alone on the same couch as his home in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus, watching footage from the police body camera shooting and killing his 22-year-old friend.
And Reverend Al Sharpton will praise his friend at a public memorial service on Tuesday, Hill’s family said on Friday.
“I mean, it still doesn’t even look real,” said Bryant. “It looks kind of crazy.”
Columbus officer Adam Coy, who is white, shot Hill dead, who Black was at the beginning of December 22, when Hill came out of a garage holding a cell phone in his left hand and his right obscured. He was visiting a family friend at the time.
The police responded to a neighbor’s non-emergency complaint about someone stopping and starting a car outside.
“He was bringing me money for Christmas. He did nothing, ”a woman inside the house yelled at the police afterwards.
Coy, who had a long history of complaints from citizens, was fired on December 28 for not activating the body camera before the confrontation and for not providing Hill with medical assistance.
In addition to an internal police investigation, the Ohio attorney general, the United States attorney for central Ohio and the FBI began their own investigations into the shooting.
At the memorial service on Tuesday morning at the First Church of God in Columbus, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump is expected to make a “call to action,” according to the Hill family statement.
Family and friends are remembering Hill – a father and grandfather – as a man dedicated to the family, an ever-smiling optimist and a skilled shopkeeper who dreamed, after years of working as a chef and restaurant manager, one day to have his own restaurant.
“I consider him a man of everything,” said his 27-year-old daughter, Karissa Hill, on Thursday. She added: “It is difficult to say what he did, because he did everything”.
Hill, 47, grew up in Columbus’ Eastmoor neighborhood, a racially mixed area on the east side of the city. He graduated in the early 1990s and obtained certification in business administration and culinary arts at Hocking College in southeastern Ohio.
Hill – “Dre” for friends and “Big Daddy” for his three grandchildren – has worked at many restaurants in Columbus over the years as a chef or manager, including Buffalo Wild Wings and Popeyes, and franchises from two smaller chains, Cooker Restaurant and the Old Bag of Nails.
He was a chef specializing in soul food, but he liked to try all styles of cuisine.
“You choose, he does it,” said Michael Henry, 49, who went to high school with Hill and later shared an apartment. He added: “That was his passion right there, cooking.”
Hill later joined Henry at Airnet Systems in Columbus, a transportation company that sent packages and mail, including overnight checks to banks. There, he met Bryant, in a game of chess. The two got along well, eventually living together and becoming more brothers than roommates, said Bryant, who met his girlfriend for four years through Hill.
Victor Carmichael met Hill and Bryant when he also joined Airnet Systems in the late 1990s. Carmichael, 44, was new to Columbus at the time and didn’t know anyone. Hill helped him find a community in Ohio, he said, typical of the type of friend he was.
Hill’s taste for chess sums up the way he behaves, said his younger brother Alvon Williams, calling him oversized.
“He had a lively chess mind,” said Williams. “Chess is a movement before its initial movement, even two movements ahead. And this is what he did every day with everything he tried to achieve ”.
Hill insisted that his family – including his daughter and grandchildren and his two sisters and brother – keep in touch, especially after a prolonged separation.
“He’s the one who makes the call – ‘Come here right now. I’m cooking dinner. Come on, ‘”said sister Michelle Hairston, 45.
Last year, the coronavirus pandemic forced Hill to interrupt his dream of owning a restaurant, and he started working on building and renovating homes to help support his family. He worked in Ohio as a subcontractor, said Sister Shawna Barnett.
The day he died, Hill set up his own team to make independent contracts, a goal he has worked for since March, Bryant said.
That Tuesday, Hill was borrowing the truck from a co-worker he intended to buy and parked it in front of his friend’s house.
Under the sweater he wore as he left the garage and walked slowly towards the police, he wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt asking George Floyd for justice.
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Farnoush Amiri is a member of the Associated Press / Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a national nonprofit service program that puts journalists in local newsrooms to report on covert issues.