Renisha McBride was her daddy’s little baby. The 19-year-old was the younger of the two inseparable McBride sisters. Ne-Ne – as her friends and family knew her – was a 5-foot-4 bundle of energy, a cheerleader who had a knack of getting you to laugh even when you were mad at her. She’d figured out how to wrap her father around her finger early on, and she’d been able to convince him to buy her two cars (the second a replacement for the first, which she totaled). She was a doting auntie to her nephew, and had dreams of becoming a police officer one day.
Renisha McBride was murdered on November 2, 2013, for asking for help. She had been at a party when she got into a fight with a friend and left early. Driving with her blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit, she collided with a parked car around 1 AM. Renisha called a friend, telling her that she had been in an accident, but was lost, confused, and her face was bleeding; her phone battery died shortly after. A witness called 9-1-1 to report the crash, and noted the driver seemed “discombobulated” and in a “confused state.” The police marked this a low priority incident, and cops did not show up for forty minutes, and by then Renisha was gone. She wandered off for three hours, knocking on doors and looking for help. Around 3:40, her banging on a door of a tidy brick house awoke its single homeowner, a 54-year-old white man. He opened the door and shot her in the face with a shotgun through his screen. He was convicted of second-degree murder.
Black lives matter.
