“My mother was my everything”: Police Murder, Family Loss and Deferred Dreams

Abstract

On December 9, 1984, a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer fatally shot New York mother of three Sharon Walker. Police violence not only killed Walker: The bullet lodged in her body harmed all those who loved her, particularly her three teenage children. Broadening conversations on police violence, this article examines the diverse ways in which police violence and parental loss impact the lives of a less familiar community of police brutality survivors: children and teenagers. It employs the 1984 police murder of Sharon Walker and her children’s lives as a window into what anthropologist Christen Smith referred to as the “lingering, deathly aftereffects of police terror on the bodies of the living in the aftermath of police killings” (Smith, “Lingering Trauma” 370).