Imagine decades ago, before cell phone video and social media, when an incident like this happened, it went unreported. But now days, near fatal interactions between police and people of color are being reported in startling numbers. For this Pennsylvania couple and their two daughters, it almost turned fatal.
Rodney and Angela Gillespie were excited when they returned July 1 to the United States to the home they’d built in 2007 on a 2.7-acre parcel in a leafy section of upscale Chadds Ford, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. His job as a senior executive with AstraZeneca, the multinational pharmaceutical company, had taken them first to London for three years and then to Johannesburg (South Africa) for three years.
Capping their first week back, the couple spent the evening of July 7 with family and friends in Lambertville, N.J. Driving home just after midnight, Rodney turned the family’s rented black Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo onto their heavily wooded, unlighted street near Baltimore Pike. That’s when their welcome home took an unforeseen turn.
Flashing blue lights and the jarring blare of police sirens signaled trouble for the couple and their 17-year-old daughter, Jaida, who was sleeping across the backseat. Their other daughter, Jasmyn, 22, was not in the car. “My wife was asleep, my daughter was asleep, and I said, ‘Oh boy, here we go,’ ” Gillespie recalled in an interview at the family’s home. “I said, ‘I’m just going to pull in the driveway because obviously it’s dark, the street has no shoulder, I don’t feel safe here.’”
Moments after parking on their well-lighted circular driveway, the Gillespies, both 52 and married 25 years, weren’t sure if they would live or die, they said. The source of their fear was a White rookie Pennsylvania State Police trooper.
Yelling loudly and with a hand on his gun, Trooper Christopher S. Johnson, 23, reached into the vehicle to turn off the ignition, but it was already turned off. The couple, who are African American, recalled that Johnson, who is White, shouted questions, orders and insults in rapid succession: “How old are you? Why did you stop here? Don’t give me that s—! Get out of the car! Why are you driving a rental car? Do you have drugs? Guns? Is that your girlfriend in the car?”
He eventually pulled Rodney Gillespie from the late-model SUV and handcuffed him. Johnson — who had been on patrol only about two months, after graduating from the Police Academy in May — reached into Gillespie’s pants pocket and removed his wallet without consent, Gillespie said. Two more state troopers — one White and one Black — quickly arrived and soon began directing questions toward a stunned Angela, who remained in the front passenger seat, too afraid to reach for her phone to record the encounter, she said.
“It was terrifying,” said Angela Gillespie, crying as she recounted the incident. “I think the biggest thing for me was sitting there watching and listening to how they treated my husband. The yelling was at a level that was terrifying. My goal was to stay alive.”
The Newark, N.J., native said she found it ironic that the couple had experienced no racial prejudice in South Africa or in the United Kingdom, only to return to racial profiling by police on their own street in the Philadelphia suburbs. “To be welcomed back this way just didn’t make sense,” she said. “This is not the America we left in 2013. We’ve come back to an elevated rage.”
The troopers freed Gillespie from the handcuffs after about 10 minutes, after his wife was allowed to use her phone to Google his name and show the troopers his online professional biography, the couple said. Johnson issued Gillespie a $142.50 ticket for a yellow-line infraction, which Gillespie paid July 16 at Magisterial District Court in Glen Mills, and a $102 ticket for not stopping immediately, which was dismissed. He said it was the first time he had been handcuffed.
“It’s humiliating. I talk to my kids about doing the right thing. I raised them to do the right thing, and to get cuffed in front of my 17-year-old daughter and my wife, it’s embarrassing,” said Gillespie, an Englewood, N.J., native with a degree in commerce and engineering from Drexel University and an M.B.A. from the University of Washington. “One thing my daughter said to me that really killed me was, ‘Dad, I can’t lose you. I can’t lose you.’ My daughter should not have to say something like that to me. What she witnessed that night is etched in her mind.” The Gillespies filed a complaint about the incident with the State Police on July 24 and are considering a lawsuit, according to their attorney, Samuel C. Stretton.
