A day after a Boston police officer was charged with manslaughter in connection with the fatal shooting of 39-year-old Stephenson King, organizers with the Roxbury-based Black Community Information Center on Friday called for the release of police body camera footage.
The race of the victim was not brought up in court Thursday, and the district attorney’s office declined to comment on whether King is a person of color. However, GBH News has obtained court documents identifying him as Black, adding another complex layer of race to the case.
“There’s a whole other aspect to this that’s not being covered in the fact that we’re talking about a Black man who was apparently assassinated by a white police officer who made the decision that he was going to take this person out,” said Sadiki Kambon, the director of the Black Community Information Center, describing the group’s decision to hold a press conference despite the officer allegedly responsible being charged with a crime. “It looks like this Stephenson, he’s our George Floyd here in Boston and that racial aspect of this shooting is being ignored totally.”
King was fatally shot after being stopped under suspicion of a carjacking in Roxbury’s Linwood Square earlier this month. King reportedly tried to flee in the car when he was shot on the evening of March 11.
Eight days later, Suffolk Country District Attorney Kevin Hayden announced a charge of manslaughter against 33-year-old officer Nicholas O’Malley. The district attorney said that firing at a moving vehicle is prohibited by both state law and Boston Police Department procedure, with limited exceptions. O’Malley pleaded not guilty and was released Thursday.
At Friday’s community press conference, members of the Black Community Information Center called for the release of police body camera footage to shed light on the sequence of events that led up to the shooting.
“Transparency is vital right now,” said Paula Coar, who lives on Linwood Street. “They released a video of them killing the white girl over there in Minnesota,” she said, drawing a connection to the January ICE-involved shooting of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis that made national headlines.
“Just show it. Tell the truth and shame the devil,” she said.
Vernard Coulter, minister at New Faith Missionary Baptist Church, agreed, saying, “I think they should show the footage because it definitely substantiates what happened.”
“I think that they’re essentially trying to chaperone the community by not letting us see the footage because I think that the footage is very telling,” said Samuel Pierce, echoing that the public should be allowed to view what happened if body cam footage is released as evidence in the court case.
At the time of his death, King was facing multiple criminal cases.
The most recent string of cases traces back to January 2024, when Boston police announced the arrest of King on firearm charges. The Boston police put out a press release identifying the man as King, of Dorchester, with the age he would have been two years earlier. In a YouTube video that includes BPD bodycam footage of that arrest, the person appears to be a person of color.
Following that arrest, he was placed under electronic monitoring with an ankle bracelet. The next month, he was charged in a separate alleged car theft which resulted in assault charges when he allegedly hit the car owner with the stolen car.
Then in April 2024, he was accused of a violent assault on a pedestrian, who reported being struck in the back of the head with a bottle and stabbed in the hand after getting off a bus and walking home.
According to detectives investigating that incident, ankle monitor data placed King within seconds of the scene and surveillance footage showed no other pedestrians in the area at the time.
Court documents obtained by GBH News dated December 2024 and related to a 2024 assault charge identifies King as “Black/African American.”
GBH News has filed a public records request with Boston police for the body camera footage for last week’s shooting. Hayden said on Thursday that the footage would not be released publicly.
Asked about King’s “extensive open cases” being a factor in O’Malley’s defense, Kambon argued that O’Malley wouldn’t have known anything about that at the time of the shooting. The police report states O’Malley was responding to a call about a carjacking.
“If he’s responding to a situation, how does he know the background of this individual that he’s supposedly trying to apprehend?” he said. “And even if he had that knowledge, if in fact he was not in danger in terms of doing his job, there’s no excuse for the fact that he put three bullets in this man unnecessarily and that’s why we’re here now.”
