"Hey, what are you doing on that porch? Whose package is that?" "It's mine. I live here, sir." "No, you don't.
A white family lives here. Don't lie to me, kid." "The name's on the box. Look. Elijah Turner.
That's me." "Yeah, shut up. You're carrying someone else's." Officer Mark Preston, a patrol officer with eight years on the force and a documented history of racial bias, was driving through a residential neighborhood he thought he knew well when he saw a black 12-year-old boy standing on the porch of a house, picking up a package and immediately assumed the Black child was stealing from what Preston believed was a white family's home. Preston confronted Elijah aggressively, refused to believe him when he said he lived there, laughed when Elijah showed him the package with his own name on it, and accused the child of opening someone else's mail.
When Elijah got scared and tried to run inside to his mother, Preston grabbed him, told him to shut up, and attempted to arrest him for theft. And when a neighbor came out and told Preston that Elijah actually lived there, Preston dismissed her, said he knew better, and when Elijah kept crying and struggling, Preston tasered the 12-year-old boy on his own front porch. What? What Officer Preston didn't know was that Elijah's mother, Rebecca Turner, was the state attorney for the county. That she would storm into the police station within the hour demanding her son's release and threatening everyone in the building.
And that his decision to taser and arrest a child would result in his firing, criminal charges, and a $1.4 million settlement that would make national headlines. Maple Grove Drive on a Thursday afternoon in late spring looked exactly the way suburban streets are supposed to look. Neat lawns, trees lining the sidewalks, kids' bikes left in driveways. The kind of neighborhood where people knew their neighbors, where delivery trucks came and went all day, and where a package sitting on a front porch was nothing unusual. Elijah Turner stood on his front porch at 4:32 p.m. right where he had been standing for the past 3 minutes waiting for the delivery truck to pull away before he opened the door.
He was 12 years old, a seventh grader at Roosevelt Middle School, and he had been tracking this package all week. It was a video game he had ordered with birthday money his grandmother had sent him last month. A new release he had been waiting for since it was announced 6 months ago. The delivery truck turned the corner and disappeared. And Elijah pushed open the front door, stepped out onto the porch, and saw the box sitting on the mat.