What Led To Ma’Khia Bryant's Death?
Lawmakers want to know how the state's care for Ma’Khia may have failed her
Most people remember Ma’Khia Bryant as the teenage girl shot by police as she wielded a knife, charging two women in Columbus Ohio.
Officer Nicholas Reardon shot shot four times — 16-year-old Ma’Khia was struck at least once.
But, for a group of lawmakers in Washington DC, Ma’Khia Bryant should never have been destined to die April 20 in what, admittedly, was a violent altercation. Her young life cut short is as much a tragedy as anything in that day's events.
They want to know what drove Ma’Khia, and what landed her in those circumstances. Sen Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) joined Rep Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore) in requesting an investigation into the events leading up to the tragic death of Ma’Khia on behalf of Paula Bryant and Myron Hammonds, Ma’Khia Bryant’s birth parents.
Before she was tragically shot to death by a police officer responding to a domestic dispute call, Ma’Khia spent two years moving between at least five different foster care homes. State-level data show that Ohio children are placed in the foster care system at a rate 10 percent higher than the national average.
Despite research that shows that kinship care is beneficial to children’s health, well-being, and cultural identity, Ohio provides far less financial support to a child in state custody who is placed with a kinship caregiver than it gives to a child placed in a licensed foster care setting, according to the lawmakers.
“The federal government has an obligation to protect the civil rights of all individuals, and especially those children, young people, and parents involved in federally-funded child welfare systems,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to both the acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children & Families and the acting director for the Office of Civil Rights at the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
“When a child dies in foster care, the system has failed. It failed Ma’Khia Bryant, who lived in her foster family home for about two months before a police officer shot and killed her in front of that home on April 20, 2021,” the lawmakers continued.
In December, Brown and Wyden led a letter to Principal Deputy Inspector General for HHS, Christi Grimm requesting an investigation into child abuse at federally funded treatment centers.
A copy of the letter is available here.