Following the tragic shooting of Pharrell William’s 25 year old cousin, Donovon Lynch on March 26th this year, Williams has spoken on the recent funeral.
In an interview with TOWN & COUNTRY, Williams shared, “I wasn’t able to deliver the speech with the fire and intention I wanted,” he says, his voice wavering, “because I was just choked with emotion.”
He continued, “We had to bury my cousin on my birthday. It was bittersweet. The way he died was bitter. Where he is right now is sweet.” Lynch was shot in their hometown of Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he was one of two people killed in separate shootings on the same evening.
A number of people have expressed scepticism over the department’s account of the incident, with the Virginia Beach Police Department stating that homicide detectives had conducted interviews with the officer involved in the shooting, as well as an officer who witnessed it along with an “independent witness.”
Within the same statement, police also claimed that Lynch was “brandishing a handgun at the time of the shooting.”
The tragic shooting speaks to the issue of ongoing police brutality and violence in the world and in this case, America specifically. In the interview with TOWN & COUNTRY, Williams also spoke on the gravity that he as a Black person feels being born in America.
He said, “As a Black person, when you’re born in this country, you immediately feel a much heavier gravity. The gravity is one that we see in our rules and regulations and laws. We see it in the lack of options. We see it in what we’re fed, what is marketed to us. We see it in broken educational systems.”
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Williams added, “Knowing that if Donovan had been white he wouldn’t have gotten shot multiple times and left in the street for an inhumane amount of time, ’til the next morning, no gun in hand—that’s gravity. The race of the officer doesn’t pertain to the conversation, because if Donovan had been white they would have never shot him like that.”
“So there is gravity. And there, too, is hope that things will change.”
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