This story is excerpted from a longer piece by Hammer & Hope. Read the full article here.
Each time Brittany Johnson presses play, her son is alive and running.
He sprints down Ida B. Wells Street, a slight silhouette fleeing something that’s out of the frame.
“Oh, that’s the National Guard right there!” shouts the girl who is recording as he makes a right on Union, then quickly darts left after a black SUV cuts him off.
“Run! Run!” shout the young people filming, urging him on.
And then there are gunshots. First one, then five or six in quick succession.
The shouts are now screams. The phone tumbles to the ground.
In the days since her son Tyrin Johnson was killed, Brittany Johnson has watched this 19-second clip over and over, until it has made her nauseated.
According to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, at around 4 a.m. on July 5, Tyrin Johnson reportedly fired a weapon, was chased by Memphis police officers, and then was fatally shot by two National Guard soldiers.
But to Brittany Johnson, 39, the video she received through sheer happenstance from the teens who saw the pursuit and decided to record does not seem to match that account.
On this day, when she is supposed to go to see her child at the funeral home for the first time since his death, Johnson again puzzles over the video, looking for answers as to why these soldiers killed her son.
“I have moments where I just want to scream and holler,” she says. But the anguish is trapped inside her because she’s not quite sure where it would or should go. “How could you be angry about something that you really don’t even know the context of?” she says.
Containing the grief allows some part of her to resist what she already knows. It’s why she has waited weeks to plan Tyrin’s funeral. Seeing his body will make this inescapably real.
“I know he’s not physically here, but I think he might be gone, and I might lose him … but I know he gone,” she says, her voice trailing off.
This has been her state, one where she cannot make sense of what she thinks or how she feels.
Tyrin Johnson will be buried five days later. It would have been his 21st birthday.
The Memphis Safe Task Force has fatally shot four men in the year since Donald Trump established it through a presidential memorandum. All of them were Black. Tyrin Johnson was the third. Before him, Darrin Pigram, 41, and Jonah Neal, 25, died at the hands of task force agents. Alfonso Ivy, 47, was killed the same week as Johnson.
The task force says all four shootings were justified, but has provided scant evidence to justify its assertions. The families of the dead have been left to grapple with their grief in the void created by the task force’s bullets and its silence.
When the news of Tyrin Johnson’s death emerged, many Memphians wondered how it could have happened. Memphians had been told that the National Guard would not be armed and was there simply to assist MPD. Governor Bill Lee had announced on Sept. 26, 2025, “The Guard will not be armed except and unless the local law enforcement makes requests for that,” and the City of Memphis website says that “Guardsmen and women will not make arrests or issue warrants.”
Lee’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but the U.S. Marshals Service, which oversees the task force, said that the National Guard has been armed since October 2025.
Brittany Johnson says that Tyrin would not have pulled a gun on the National Guard soldiers, as was reported by the Memphis Police Department. Her son wanted to live. He had a 1-year-old son.
At about 5 feet 5 inches and 120 pounds, Tyrin was “little” — his mother’s word — and seemed to be in a constant state of capricious delight. Johnson has hundreds of other videos of Tyrin — with his son on a Chicago beach, singing old R&B songs to his son’s mother, dancing, jokingly provoking Brittany as she is lying in bed, trying to rest.
“See, he play too much!” says Johnson. “He gon’ do some goofy stuff!”
It bothers her that Tyrin has been portrayed as a criminal. He was a musician who had turned his bedroom into a studio. Though he’d been shy as a child, he started doing door-to-door sales, and “he could sell you a dream,” says Johnson. Tyrin was also a sharp dresser who loved suits and often “borrowed” his mother’s new sneakers to complete his outfits.
Even if Tyrin had a gun, Johnson says that didn’t make him dangerous. In Tennessee, many adults can legally carry a handgun without a permit. Tyrin had gotten one, she explains, because he was being targeted by a gang whose members had on more than one occasion physically assaulted him, to the point where he had moved to another state.
In August, Brittany Johnson received Tyrin’s autopsy results from the West Tennessee Regional Forensic Center showing that he was killed by a bullet that entered the right side of his back, piercing his lung, spine and rib.
The day after Tyrin’s autopsy results became public, National Guard patrols in Memphis were paused. A U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson said the troops were instead doing “administrative work.”
‘They didn’t come to arrest him’
Darrin Pigram, 41, was the first to be killed by the task force, shot by a DEA officer on the morning of May 13 at the Burger King where he worked.
Pigram’s family called him Darnell. He was the oldest of six children — “First one came in my life and the first one to leave my life,” said his father, Louis Jamison.
In the weeks since his son was killed, Jamison has sought solace at the same lake where he was fishing on May 13 when he got a call from his son Louis telling him he needed to come home. Jamison knew when he saw the number of cars in his yard that something devastating had happened.
“I have my days, right now, I don’t believe it. I think it’s just a dream,” he says. “I don’t really want to believe that it is happening.”
The DEA agents had gone to Pigram’s workplace to serve an arrest warrant for a pending aggravated assault case. The agents said while initially compliant, Pigram became “visually and verbally aggressive,” according to records received from the office of District Attorney General Steve Mulroy of Shelby County through a public records request.
The records include a letter from Mulroy to Gadyaces Serralta, director of the U.S. Marshals Service, stating that DEA Agent Levy Blandon fired at Pigram only after he saw Pigram reach for a gun in his waistband. Blandon shot Pigram five times.
It is hard to see what transpired in the video footage released by the DA’s office. The letter notes that the video is grainy, has no audio, and is incomplete. It also states, “The camera footage of the physical activity between Mr. Pigram and Agent Blandon does not support these claims of aggressive action at the doorway.”
Mulroy did not respond to questions about why, given this discrepancy, he relied on the agents’ accounts in determining that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. But during a previous interview, he said that while he has sympathy for Pigram’s family, “the officers involved say that Mr. Pigram was reaching for the gun in his waistband. We have no evidence to affirmatively disprove that. And it is our burden to affirmatively disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt if we’re going to pursue charges.”
Jamison feels the agents could have done something to de-escalate but saw Pigram’s alleged criminality rather than his humanity.
“They knew what they came to do,” says Jamison. “They didn’t come to arrest him. They came to kill him.”
Many task force arrests end in dismissals
There has been little reported about the death of Alfonso Ivy, 47, who was killed by a DEA agent at a hotel on July 8. His autopsy results, received from the Office of the State Chief Medical Examiner through a public records request, indicate that he died from multiple gunshot wounds. The investigator narrative on the autopsy report states he was shot by law enforcement who were serving a warrant after Ivy drew his gun. No next of kin is listed on the report.
While the White House has used the task force’s high arrest numbers as an indication of its success, records received from the DA’s office show that during the first month of the DA’s reports, prosecutors dropped 27 of 36 charges initiated by the task force. In the six reports covering prosecutorial actions from May 14 through Aug. 6, 99 of 192 ended in nolle prosequi, meaning prosecutors dropped the charge, and another seven were dismissed.
Some charges fell apart for reasons that raise questions about whether the arrests were lawful. In one drug case, prosecutors cited the Fourth Amendment — the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and arrests without probable cause — in dropping the charges.
A U.S. Marshals spokesman said it does not track the disposition of the arrests and did not comment on the fact that so many charges were dismissed.
“We measure the arrests as our performance because that is what the task force was created to do,” he wrote in an email. “The goal, which we are accomplishing, was to lower crime in Memphis. We will continue that mission until we are told by the Administration to reduce or end.”
Local officials had warned that the number of arrests would overwhelm an already strained system. On Oct. 9, 2025, Lee Harris, then mayor of Shelby County, declared a state of emergency, stating that the task force deployment could lead to a 200 percent increase in arrests and severe overcrowding at the Shelby County jail. There were already issues with overcrowding at the jail. The task force arrests made it worse.
“They were very generous in providing law enforcement resources on the front end, but not so much with the resources we needed on the back end — courts, prosecutors, clerk’s office to manage the dockets, the jail itself,” says Mulroy.
Mulroy says that most of the arrests were for minor infractions as opposed to violent crimes, and that about 20 percent were related to immigration — unlawful presence in the country, not a criminal charge.
‘There’s no way she could have feared for her life’
Every morning, after Jessica Neal says her prayers, she talks to her son, Jonah. She asks him to watch over his two younger sisters. “I always tell him I’ll be OK, you know. I’ll figure it out. Eventually,” she says.
Neal, 45, lives in a two-bedroom apartment that is the mirror image of the one where her son was shot. She has moved the photographs of Jonah from her bedroom to the living room, because her therapist said that her bedroom should be a place where she might find some relief. Jessica has adorned her bedroom walls with Paris-inspired paintings instead. She hopes to visit the city someday. It hasn’t helped her sleep. She now needs a night light, and her dreams are often flashbacks to the day her son was killed.
On May 20, Neal came home to find Jonah, 25, with her gun, saying he was going to kill himself. She went outside and called 911 for help. Homeland Security Investigations agents responded and entered the apartment.
Neal said that she heard an agent shout something, and then a single gunshot. She closed her eyes and covered her ears. “I didn’t really want to see anything,” she says.
One of her neighbors later said that after the sound of the gunshot, the overcast sky turned orange.
Neal sat in an officer’s car outside her apartment for about four hours and says she was not allowed to call anyone. Two officers eventually told her they wanted to ask her some questions.
“I told them, ‘If something did happen to my son, I don’t want to know by myself. I want somebody here with me,’” she says.
The officer asked, “What do you mean if something happened?”
“I was like, ‘Well, if he got shot or something,’ and then she was like, ‘Well, unfortunately there was a gunshot incident, and your son didn’t make it,’” says Neal.
The TBI’s initial report said that it was not clear whether Jonah Neal had died from self-inflicted knife wounds or the agent’s gunshot.
In 1988, Memphis was the first city to create what became known as the “Memphis Model”: specially trained police officers who would respond to mental health crises and de-escalate encounters. It remains unclear why Homeland Security Investigations agents responded when Neal called 911 because she feared her son might harm himself.
On Aug. 25, Neal received Jonah’s death certificate, showing that he was killed by a gunshot wound to his neck. The manner of death is homicide. She and her attorney have also viewed body-camera footage that she says indicates that Jonah did not have a gun in his hand. As the agent who shot him shouts, “Put the gun down,” Neal says a second agent is heard telling the first that Jonah is not holding one.
“He was doing everything that she said to do. And even when she was told that it was not a gun, she shot. There’s no way she could have feared for her life,” says Neal.
On Aug. 30, Jonah’s birthday, Neal drove to his grave at the cemetery in Kentucky where he is buried next to his great-grandfather. She took a cake and a stuffed elephant, an echo of the Dumbo theme she had used to decorate Jonah’s crib.
About a month after Tyrin’s funeral, Johnson watched as her grandson tried to figure out a way down from her bed, which is high off the ground. One of her sisters worried he would fall. They watched as he tightly gripped the bedsheets and gingerly lowered himself to the floor. Johnson burst into tears.
“His daddy told him how to get down without falling,” she says.
Tyrin and his son would practice. Every time the toddler found his way down, Tyrin would put him back on the bed and say, “Come on, try it again.”
The autopsy results answered one question for Johnson — how Tyrin died — but left her with several others. Why did officers say Tyrin had turned toward the soldiers with a gun when he was clearly shot in the back? Why does the security camera footage she viewed in the prosecutor’s office become blurry only in the seconds that captured Tyrin being shot?
Johnson is still wrestling with the unknown. But her grief has made space for anger.
“Right now the fight is all in me,” she says. “Every time I look at my grandson, and I see my son ain’t coming back, I’m like, You know what? Somebody got to pay for something.”
Lisa Armstrong is a contributing writer at Hammer & Hope. She is a journalist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Journalism School. Her reporting examines inequality and the resilience of people navigating systems of state power.
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