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THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF TYISHA MILLER | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
Tyisha Miller lived in Rubidoux, a poor, racially mixed, unincorporated area across the Santa Ana River from Riverside. Riverside and Rubidoux are part of the "Inland Empire," the stretch of land and dusty desert hills east of Los Angeles that includes San Bernardino and Riverside counties. A handsome stone bridge connects the stately Victorian homes of downtown Riverside to Rubidoux's main thoroughfare, Mission Boulevard, which is lined with storefront skeletons, gas stations and small groceries. Off the avenue, small homes, most in various states of disrepair, line the bumpy streets. Rubidoux has the look and feel of the dusty encampments seen in Depression-era photographs. Mobile homes abound and every few blocks there are empty lots littered with debris, where farm animals -- pigs, goats and even cows -- graze indiscriminately. It was in Rubidoux that Tyisha Miller grew up. Friends describe Miller as an athletic, church-going young woman with a ready smile who planned on attending college or entering the military. Her mother is disabled and her father absent, so she lived with her aunt, who friends say was strict but loving. She liked to drink and party with friends. On Dec. 27, the day before she died, she borrowed her aunt's car, went out with some girlfriends and never came home again. Tyisha Miller's last hours, as reported by the local newspaper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise, went something like this: Miller and five girlfriends went to a nearby mall at about 4 p.m., stayed for a few hours and then headed for an amusement park. There, they went on a water ride, filled out job applications for the ride, then went to a city park, where they "talked and wrestled on the grass." Some of the girlfriends say they had been drinking, but others deny it. An autopsy found that Miller had been drinking that day -- the alcohol level in her bloodstream was .13, one and a half times the legal limit for driving -- and had recently smoked marijuana. According to the Press-Enterprise, Miller was paged by her aunt several times during the day but delayed returning the calls. A friend quoted in the paper said Miller didn't call her aunt sooner because she knew "she was being naughty" and she didn't want to return the car. At about 12:30 a.m., Miller dropped off all but one of her friends, a 15-year-old girl nicknamed Bug. While heading home to Rubidoux, the car got a flat tire and they stopped at a convenience store. There, according to what friends told lawyers, a white man the young women didn't know replaced the flat with a spare. But the air pump at the convenience store didn't work, so they drove to a gas station, less than a mile away, followed by the man. When they realized the spare tire would not hold air, Miller began calling friends for help. Bug hitched a ride to Rubidoux with the man, while Miller waited with the car for her friends to arrive. About an hour later, one of Miller's cousins and a friend arrived at the gas station and found Miller locked in her car, with her seat back, music playing on the radio and a .380 semiautomatic pistol in her lap. She didn't respond to knocks on her window. The cousin and friend thought Miller was foaming at the mouth. They called 911 and reported Tyisha was in distress, and that she had a gun. They then called her aunt's house to get keys to the car. Because the 911 call reported that Miller had a gun, a police car as well as an ambulance was dispatched. The police arrived approximately two minutes later. They tried to rouse Miller by banging on the windows and eventually breaking them. At this point, police accounts diverge. Two of the officers say Miller reached for her pistol; two said they weren't sure whether she reached for it or not. The four officers -- all white -- fired about 27 shots, hitting Miller at least a dozen times. The Riverside police have not released tapes or transcripts of the 911 call or of the radio communication among the officers -- a fact that has been singled out by critics, who point out that they had no problem releasing the autopsy report showing that Miller was legally drunk. Miller's family has hired Dr. Michael Baden, a pathologist who took part in the O.J. Simpson trial and in probes of the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to perform an independent autopsy. In preliminary findings, Baden told the Miller family that Tyisha was reclining and her hand was by her side -- proof, her relatives say, that she did not reach for a gun. The Millers' lawyers, one of whom is famed Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran, did not return phone calls seeking comment for this article. No charges against the police have yet been filed. Police department spokesman Chris Manning said he could not corroborate the chain of events because no one involved had agreed to be interviewed by police, even though he had made five public, published requests for them to come forward. "Either they have not gotten the word, or they are not wishing to be interviewed," said Manning. Indeed, several of the young women complained after they were subpoenaed before the grand jury. Manning would not comment further on the case, citing his department's ongoing internal investigation. The Riverside County district attorney's office, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles and the FBI are also all investigating the case. Many questions persist about the events of that evening. The key ones involve guns. Why did the police, who were responding to an emergency call, wind up shooting the victim? And why did Miller have a gun? The weapon on her lap was registered to a woman who has never heard of Tyisha Miller, Manning said. It has been speculated that it was stolen. But critics of the police say these questions are beside the point. Miller's family and friends insist she was no gangbanger, no gun-toter. "[The police] use the gun as a catch-all," Bernell Butler says when I ask him about Tyisha's pistol. "We have a right to bear arms. The cops didn't know if it was loaded, if it was fake -- they didn't even know if she was law enforcement!" If the Riverside police were talking, they'd probably be saying one thing: Tyisha Miller had a gun. Policemen are trained to respond in a split second to anyone who confronts them with a gun -- their lives depend on it. A reasonable reconstruction of the tragic events of that night might be that the officers simply reacted in self-defense when Miller, startled awake out of a drunken sleep by the shattering of the car windows and assuming she was being attacked, either reached for her gun or made some other fast movement, triggering the fatal fusillade of bullets. No racism need be invoked to explain this scenario -- unless one assumes that police are quicker on the trigger in cases involving blacks. Another reasonable reconstruction might be that the officers, aggressively aware that Miller had a gun, improperly went into full our-lives-are-in-danger hair-trigger mode before they even approached the car, dealing with the situation as if they were interrupting a crime in progress rather than trying to wake up a young woman sleeping one off in a car with a gun on her lap for self-protection. Under this account, it's easily conceivable that a skittish policeman, mistaking the shattering glass for a movement by Miller, simply opened fire on the sleeping woman, and that the rest of the officers immediately followed suit. Race might play a role in such a scenario, or it might not: Police, as pointed out above, don't like people of any race who have guns. But even if race was not a factor in the killing of Tyisha Miller, the police don't exactly come off looking good. Why, one might ask, did they approach a car that they knew contained an ill, armed person so aggressively? Why did they shatter the windows while standing next to the car? Wasn't what happened only too predictable? Couldn't they have found another way? N E X T+P A G E+| Black lives, white lives |
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