Jay Pharoah says his mother ‘felt totally helpless’ after learning about her encounter with DPLA

Jay Pharoah says his mother ‘felt totally helpless’ after learning about her encounter with DPLA

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Frazer Harrison / Getty Jay Pharoah

Jay Pharoah is opening up about his parents’ reaction to the scary encounter with the police last year.

In a preview of Monday’s episode of Taraji P. Henson’s Facebook Watch series Peace of mind, the old one Saturday Night Live star, 33, shared how her mother and father reacted after learning about the incident, in which Pharoah said an officer put a knee to his neck during an identity confusion case last April.

“I called and talked to my mom, she was on the phone,” said Pharoah to Henson, 50. “Of course my dad was in the background. But my mom was just – I could hear it in her voice. I could hear the tremors, the ‘and if.’ “

He continued: “And that’s what she said: ‘We could have lost you today, if it had been different.’ She was like, ‘You really need to thank God.’ I said, ‘I thank God. But, Mom, I’m just mad now. I’m in a way that I’ve never been mad before. Because I’ve never been there.’ “

While his mother “felt totally helpless” about the incident, Pharoah said her father “was just trying to find out what was going on”.

“And I have to applaud my people for just keeping me out of it,” added Pharoah of his parents. “Just because, the two in the neighborhood. But they tried to shelter me in a way that I didn’t have to deal with it. And at the end of the day, I resolved. There was nothing that could be done. So, I know that moment for them it had to arouse emotions too. “

RELATED: Jay Pharoah remembers the officer kneeling on his neck during the DPLA meeting: ‘I just thought, why?’

Pharoah first shared the story and images from the security camera of the June meeting, amid continuing protests over the death of George Floyd. In an interview with Gayle King in CBS This Morning that July, the star said he was crossing the street when a group of police officers approached him and instructed him to get up and extend his arms

After he obeyed, “The officer comes, he gets on top of me, he puts his knee on me … he puts the handcuffs on,” Pharoah reminded King.

Finally, Pharoah said the police pulled him over and said he fit the description of a black man in gray sweatpants and a gray shirt, which the comedian was also wearing. Asked how he thought they should have approached him, Pharoah said: “I think the right way to deal with the situation would have been for the police to calmly come to me, since they see that I have nothing with me. They should have been like , ‘Hey man, we have a problem now, we ask if you have your identity, because there is someone who just escaped the police scene and we are looking for him.’ “

According to Pharoah, he informed the police that he did not have his identity, but that they could search for his name on Google. “A few minutes later, they came back and said, ‘Oh, we got a call saying that you’re not the guy. Sorry,'” he said, “That’s not enough.”

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Reflecting on being immobilized on the floor, Pharoah said to King, “I just thought, why? Now, I don’t have eight minutes and 46 seconds of an officer standing over me like this, blocking my airways and choking me. I don’t there’s this. Fortunately, they pulled me up and I got out of it. But it’s like, why does it have to go to that extreme, when I’m an innocent bystander? “

Pharaoh also said that his parents were upset when he told them the story.

“I called my mom and told her what happened. My father was also on the phone. My mom started to cry, ”he said. “It is a terrible feeling that the result of a terrible situation can have such an impact on the people around you.”

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