A Black Man, A Bad Cop, and What I Saw Through My Blue Eyes.
By: Christie Alex Costello
Tags: Equality, Love, BlackLivesMatter, Racism, Nonfiction

I met this kid named Jordan when I was around fifteen. We were teenagers. I was tall, blond hair, blue eyes, and lanky. He was tall, caramel skin, brown eyes, with an athletic build. We became close friends quickly after seeing him on my walk home from school most afternoons. He was two years older than me and lived about four blocks away. Jordan was always quiet and calm. I was outspoken and silly. He was black, and I was white. None of that mattered to us, but in hindsight, it mattered to the outside world.

Jordan was smart. He could write the most beautiful cursive I had ever seen. I went to high school with his cousin. I knew his little sister, and she was in my little brother’s grade. His parents had recently split up, and I watched as he started absorbing the weight of his father’s absence. I learned a lot from him.

One year on a hot summer day after knowing him about six months, he gave me a gold ring with a purple shaped stone in the middle. He said to me,

“This is what your heart looks like to me. You are too down, too deep, too kind, and too genuine for this world. Stay away from people. Stay shook. You have too much to give and people will always take more than they deserve.”

Jordan protected me from the bullshit of the world. I tried to help, but I was young and didn’t have much of my own to give, so I watched him struggle to exist. Two worlds so far apart, yet so close together. We didn’t know anything about the world we would later face. Then in 2004, on a summer morning, a cop pulled Jordan off the street on a charge that wasn’t his. Jordan matched the obnoxiously racist description: Black and about six feet tall. That was the description, what the actual fuck! We all knew he hadn’t done what the cops described as a robbery and assault.

Jordan wasn’t a violent person, but there was no proof that he hadn’t been there. He was home alone at 6:00 am at the time the alleged event took place. It was his word against a cop’s word. In my mind, I thought Jordan would be home quickly, the evidence the police had was laughable. My first introduction to deep, systemic inequality at the age of fifteen. I wasn’t prepared, and it hit me faster than the bullets in an AK-47, so I could only imagine what it did to him.

Jordan couldn’t afford a lawyer. My mom and I paid for it, no questions asked. I wrote letters; I visited the jail every Friday at 6:00 pm for almost two years. I sat through court dates and skipped school for the first trial with my mom. The trial lasted nearly two weeks. Each week while he awaited a verdict, I talked to his family to update them on what was going on. I held down the small world he had. I felt I owed him that much.

To watch as a racist system came crashing down before my blue eyes felt almost unreal. During the trial, it was hard to watch tears fall down his face during opening remarks as a cop tightened Jordan’s cuffs until his wrists bled. The officer thought no one noticed, I did. I asked mid-remark for the cop to stop, and they almost kicked me out of the courtroom. In my dreams, I still see that moment as he sat handcuffed with tears running down his face with the cop smiling behind him.

I knew what injustice looked like, but that wasn’t the first time I’d seen it. The first time was a year earlier when another friend of mine was slammed so hard against a Subway sandwich fast food restaurant window that the police broke his jaw. Later, a friend of mine was shot in the back outside of school and paralyzed from the waist down. I knew racism was alive, and it was hurting the people I cared about. I was introduced to a systemic issue that, at fifteen, felt more prominent than I could fathom. A century of racism, sitting right before my eyes.

Despite all my effort, the corrupt system still won. I wish to the world each day that I could do more. I want to make things right, but how? I know too much, and I am just one person. I’ve carried this devastation, but with a different weight than Jordan, who eventually went to jail for twenty-five years after two mistrials on a charge that wasn’t his. Twenty-five years were stolen from a Black man in America, but I guess, in hindsight, at least he got to live.

I kept that purple ring Jordan gave me for a very long time. I never looked at police officers or the city of St. Louis the same way again. The experience left me exhausted and defeated and unsure of how to use my knowledge for good, until now. I believe the world connected me to this experience to more clearly expose a truth that is currently being filmed each day around the globe: Equality is a requirement that some people, for whatever reason, still believe is an option. This is not acceptable. I keep this memory close, and I advocate because I know too much to stay quiet. I support every action and decision in the community. I support Black Lives Matter. I support my partner today and all of his efforts to find equality as a Black man in America. I am here for it. I am here to ensure that this doesn’t continue for another fourteen years.

Equality is a requirement, not an option.

In summer of 2020, Jordan was released and is now looking for work and community support in St. Louis, MO. Donate to support here.