When Ronald Ritchie—the white man whose white wife prompted him to call 911 on John Crawford—described the scene at Walmart to the operator, he lied that Crawford had pointed the toy gun at a couple of children. In the surveillance video, you can see the children and their mother—a white woman named Angela Williams—shopping unconcernedly near Crawford. When the police arrived and shot Crawford, Williams ran in fear with her children, suffered a heart attack, and died. In the name of the protection of mythic white femininity, police killed a black man and the white woman they imagined he would
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