Big Herk started off rapping with the Detroit-based group Rock Bottom. A picture of Beyoncé—isn't that a woman. Line was waiting for him at the bus station. Not "Was the killing justified?" or looming even larger, "Do the LAPD have a race problem?"And he had a new friend, Jose. So he would take himself away from the noise of the street to call her. Cameroonians usually found each other quickly, but Charly was alone. "Sis," he told Line, "if they ask me to choose between food and going back home—I choose to go back home." They did not speak of the robbery. They began to call him Africa. His left remains in the tent.Sunday, Skid Row, Los Angeles, America. If she had, Charly might have told her about the movies in his mind, ones in which he slipped easily into the roles of his favorite actor: Charly as Vito Corleone, Charly as Jake LaMotta—Charly Keunang, the De Niro of Cameroon.Maybe this matters. Then he saw his mug shot on the television. "Why do you call me at—"But it was, for a time, otherwise."Goddamn!" hollers one of the men filming it on a cell phone. We hear Martinez. He thought that as an actor, he could finesse the jury. Volasgis will say the suspect lets go of his pistol only after the first shot is fired.
Just past noon on March 1, 2015, three police officers shot him six times, according to the autopsy commissioned by the family. "Put your hands up!" snaps Syed. Both things are true and neither is an answer. But after a while he stopped going. Rocking.Line's daughter, Jaycee, goes to her mother's side and holds her. Like the movies. Pretty little soprano through the jailhouse phone.The officers spread out in a circle around the body like a flower.
The only work he could find was under the table. You see it in the way Isaac holds the boy, the way Charly leans back into his father's big arms.The detectives will ask Volasgis: "Did he resist?"It is a joke, she thinks. My stick!" yells Volasgis.He returned to Los Angeles after a short while. He says it twice.Martinez and Syed are wearing body cameras. His Cameroonian accent is crisp, formal, his words considered: "If you let me express myself, maybe you may have a chance to explain why you're doing this right now."In May of this year, it was Brendon Glenn, under circumstances, again, almost identical to Charly's.One officer says, "Stop moving!" Another officer picks up the cry: "Stop resisting!" he says, to the body on the ground, to the crowd that has gathered, the cameras that are recording, the detectives who will question them.