After police trial, Tyre Nichols’s mom clings to ‘a piece of justice’

During the hours that Tyre Nichols lay unresponsive in intensive care after he was beaten by police in January 2023, his mother, RowVaughn Wells, couldn’t bear to tell the people closest to them that he was dying.

Keyana Dixon, Nichols’s older sister who lives in Sacramento, kept asking her mother to put Nichols on the phone. But the 29-year-old had suffered irreversible brain damage from blunt force to the skull delivered by city police officers after a traffic stop, an autopsy later determined. Wells decided that she would not explain to her daughter the extent of the injuries — she clung to the slim chance her son would wake up and start talking again — and that seeing the life drained from his body could be her private pain.

Read more of criminal justice reporter Robert Klemko's piece on the Wells and Tyre Nichols in the Washington Post.