BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The Louisiana capital is marked by memorials — flowers, balloons and stuffed animals with notes of condolences.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The Louisiana capital is marked by memorials — flowers, balloons and stuffed animals with notes of condolences.
In the past two weeks, Baton Rouge has seen a black man shot to death by white police and night after night of protests, followed by a fatal attack on three officers by a gunman who seemed to target the badge.
The city of 229,000 is better known for its championship college football team and its political scene. But this broiling summer, it has been churning through tension and grief and taking a leading role in the national debate about race and law enforcement.
Sterling Pierce, a 32-year-old black appliance store worker, was shaken up as he paid his respects Tuesday outside the convenience store near where the officers were killed. A sign posted at a memorial read: “God … please help us heal!”
Shaking his head, Pierce struggled to make sense of recent events and to foresee an end to the violence. He showed bullet marks on his car and said the city’s problems run deep.
The killing “is not going to stop down here,” he said. “It’s never going to change.”
Pierce said he was friends with Alton Sterling, the black man shot by white officers two weeks ago. He also knew one of the officers killed this week, East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s Deputy Brad Garafola, a repeat customer at the store where Pierce works.
“This just messed me up,” he said. “I don’t know how to feel.”
As he spoke, Pierce was approached by a white woman, Deirdre Breaux, who hugged him.
“We’re all the same on the inside. We’re just a veneer on the outside,” said the 49-year-old antiques collector from nearby Central.
She was more hopeful, praising the tone and actions of city, state and federal officials.
“I see them lining up. They want to see progress, change,” Breaux said. “What we don’t need are outsiders bringing their propaganda and upsetting what we’re trying to heal.”
In the aftermath of Sterling’s July 5 death, thousands of people turned out at several locations around Baton Rouge for protests. The 37-year-old was killed as the officers pinned him to the pavement outside a convenience store where he sold CDs.
The killing was captured on cellphone video and widely circulated online. The footage drew attention to strained race relations and longstanding inequities in a city with a 55 percent black population that is informally segregated. Northern neighborhoods are predominantly black, southern ones white.
The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into the death.
The next weekend, police in riot gear arrested nearly 200 protesters. The clashes grew increasingly intense after a deadly police shooting in Minnesota and the killing of five officers in Dallas.
Civil rights groups and activists sued Baton Rouge law enforcement agencies over their treatment of protesters. The police chief defended the response, saying authorities discovered a plot against police that weekend.