No Indictments for New Jersey Officers Who Shot Black Man With Hands Up

Jerame Reid was the passenger in a car pulled over for failure to stop at a stop sign.

Screenshot from a police car dashboard camera video showing Bridgeton police officers Roger Worley and Braheme Days shooting and killing Jerame Reid on December 30, 2014.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A New Jersey grand jury has decided not to indict two Bridgeton, New Jersey, police officers who shot and killed Jerame Reid in December 2014. Reid’s death sparked protests in the town, about an hour south of Philadelphia, as the national conversation about police shootings of black men intensified in the months after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri.

Reid, 36, was the passenger in a car pulled over on December 30, after it allegedly didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Bridgeton police officers Roger Worley and Braheme Days approached the car, and Days, talking to the driver of the car from the passenger side, began to explain why the officers pulled them over. Days then apparently noticed a gun in the glove compartment after the driver reached for his papers, and immediately drew his gun. Days reached in, removed the gun, and told Reid and the driver not to move. Reid said he was going to get out of the car and get on the ground, but Days told him not to and tried to keep the door closed. Days can be heard in a police dashboard camera video saying Reid would be dead if he reached for anything.

Reid opened the door and got out of the car with his hands up, after saying, “I ain’t doing nothing. I’m not reaching for nothing, bro.” As Reid got out, Worley fired one shot through the car’s windshield and didn’t hit anything, according to the Cumberland County prosecutor’s office. Days fired seven shots, which struck Reid repeatedly, according to prosecutors.

Both officers were placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation, and Reid’s family filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court against the city of Bridgeton. Days is also facing a separate lawsuit for an alleged rape. A message left for the Bridgeton Police Department wasn’t immediately returned on Thursday afternoon. In June, Cumberland County reached a $340,000 settlement with Reid’s estate for a lawsuit he had pending against the county, alleging that he had been beaten in jail after a 2009 arrest.

Bridgeton is near Vineland, where another man died at the hands of the police. Phillip White, 32, died in custody shortly after the Vineland police tried to arrest him. A cellphone video shows the police on top of White and punching him, while also letting a police dog bite him. That investigation remains ongoing.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate