Fulford’s cousin, Eric Garner, was the black man killed by New York City police officers for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. In 2014, Fulford endured yet another tragedy, this time in his own family. The details of Heyward’s killing too closely mirror the case of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy who was killed by a police officer in an Ohio park, in 2014, also for playing with a toy gun, in an eerie congruence too cruel and precise to be merely coincidental. In 1994, Nicholas Naquan Heyward, Jr., a thirteen-year-old black boy, was playing with a toy gun in a stairwell when he was shot in the stomach by a police officer. It was at the Gowanus Houses where Fulford was first made aware of a murder at the hands of the police. Jason Fulford grew up in Brooklyn, a few subway stops away from the Gowanus Houses, the public-housing project where his cousin and grandparents lived.
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