“How does somebody go into a Walmart and not come out alive?”
Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
John Crawford Jr. would regularly make the 400-mile drive from his home in Jackson, Tennessee, to Fairfield, Ohio, to see his son, John Crawford III. Sometimes they would plan a week in advance to meet up. Sometimes Crawford would call his son along the way. On Aug. 5, he decided to surprise him. He got in his car and made the trek to the home of Tressa Sherrod, John's mother.
When Crawford arrived in Fairfield he saw LeeCee Johnson, the mother of John Crawford III's two children, outside on her cell phone. She looked perplexed, Crawford thought. He just waved and walked into Sherrod's house.
"Where's Trey?" Crawford asked her about their son John, using his nickname.
Sherrod said John had gone out with a friend. Crawford figured he'd be back soon, so he sat down on the couch and started playing with his two grandsons, nearly 2-year-old John Henry IV and 5-month-old Jayden.
Then Crawford heard Johnson scream to him from outside, "Oh. Mr. John, Mr. John! They shot him! They shot him!"
Crawford ran out to the front yard when he heard the cry. Johnson had been on the phone with John the whole time. She heard the shots ring out, and said John screamed: "Dad! Dad!"
Once Crawford got outside, Johnson put the phone on speaker.
"I heard him scream," Crawford told BuzzFeed News. "Some more voices were saying stuff like, 'Try to hold your arms up, sir. We need you to try to stay with us.'"
Crawford stood there stunned, listening to the tragedy play out over the phone and unable to help his dying son. Johnson was jumping up and down. John, on the other end of the phone, was gasping, trying to breathe, sucking for air.
And then, suddenly, there was silence.
"That was it," Crawford said.
That was the day 22-year-old John Crawford III was fatally shot by police inside a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, near Dayton.
Surveillance video shows John Crawford III walking around the store with a pellet gun that he picked up inside the store.
A 911 caller would indicate that John Crawford III was pointing the pellet gun — which police would later discover to be a toy — at other shoppers, though there's no way to tell if that's true based on the video. The caller later recanted this statement. After the 911 call came in, Beavercreek police officer Sean Williams and Sgt. David Darkow responded to the scene.
Darkow said in an official statement that once he was inside the store, he yelled for John Crawford III to get on the ground, but that he made a "quick movement."
Williams said in his official statement that he shot John Crawford III twice after he didn't respond to multiple commands to drop his weapon and turned toward police in an "aggressive manner."
The video, finally released to the public last week, doesn't seem to support this. Williams appears to shoot John Crawford III right after commanding him to drop his weapon.
Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
John Henry Crawford III was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 29, 1992, to John Crawford Jr. and Tressa Sherrod, who were both in their mid-twenties. The couple never married, but they were always a family.
"We were young. The timing just wasn't there," Crawford Jr. said. "We kind of laugh about it. We were together so much that people would often call her Mrs. Crawford."
Crawford Jr. worked in the Tennessee criminal justice system as a probation officer and criminal counselor and eventually relocated south for work, but his various jobs kept him in and out of the Cincinnati area frequently. The couple's only son, John, would frequently visit his father too. Crawford could always tell if his son was there if the Weather Channel or History Channel were on the television.
"I could tell if he had been there while I was gone if the TV was on one of those two channels," Crawford said. "It got to the point, I would just leave it on the Weather Channel if I'm not there."
"He and I had a conversation the night before [John was killed] about him getting back into school," Crawford said. "If I had to argue, he was probably going into the sciences. Maybe he would have been a meteorologist."
Growing up, John Crawford III was in and out of different public and private schools in the Cincinnati area. As a teenager, his dad remembers John getting "stressed out" and worried about the direction he was going. Sensing his son was in a rut, Crawford started calling around to various academies that could be an alternative to John's normal high school. They made the decision for John to register at Greensburg Christian Academy, which offered a program where students pay a fee and take a test to receive their high school diploma rather than go to class. At age 20, John passed the test and got his high school diploma.
Following his death, stories attempting to raise questions about John Crawford III's character began to surface in the media.
The Cincinnati Enquirer published a report on John Crawford III's criminal record, stating that he had minor offenses for marijuana possession and disorderly conduct. The article citing Hamilton County Court records also said in 2013 John Crawford III was charged with a felony for allegedly carrying a concealed weapon and for aggravated robbery. A grand jury declined to indict John III on the felony charges and his dad told the Cincinnati Enquirer his son was only initially charged because he was in his cousin's car at the time.
The scrutiny of John Crawford III was reminiscent of how the character of other young black men shot under controversial circumstances has been litigated in the media.
Photos of Trayvon Martin giving the middle finger were widely circulated following his February 2012 shooting death. Reports surfaced nine days after he was killed in August that Michael Brown had marijuana in his system at the time of his death. The attorney for Michael Dunn, the man recently convicted of murder for shooting unarmed black teenager Jordan Davis, said the case was really about "a subculture thug issue."
After receiving his high school diploma from Greensburg, Crawford III worked a number of odd jobs. He would pick up telemarketing gigs through a temp agency and manual labor jobs through some guys that his dad knew.
Soon, LeeCee Johnson and John Crawford III had their first son: John Henry Crawford IV. On John deciding to give his son the family name, John Crawford Jr. said, "I didn't really expect that. That showed me that he really thought a lot of me." The family gave John IV the nickname "Quatto" — just like his family had nicknamed John Crawford III "Trey."
A year later, Johnson would give birth to their second child, Jayden. John was growing increasingly frustrated with his job prospects — he had two sons and needed a steady income. And he was tired of asking his parents to help him financially.
"The night before everything transpired we had a conversation about him wanting to get back into school," Crawford said. "I was trying to expedite that, get him going in the spring somewhere — Kentucky State maybe, that's my alma mater."
John was, as his dad put it, "getting on track."
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