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About 90 gather to talk about police killing of Niles man
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
About 90 people gathered at Second Baptist Church on Main Avenue Southwest Thursday night to have a “community conversation on justice” regarding the Jan. 2 shooting death of Matthew Burroughs by Niles police.
The meeting was organized by the Youngstown-based ACTION – Alliance for Congregational Transformation Influencing our Neighborhoods – and the Committee for Justice for Matt.
Burroughs, 35, was shot while in his car in the parking lot in front of his Royal Mall apartment in Niles after a confrontation a short time earlier with a probation officer in Niles Municipal Court. Officers were waiting for him as he drove into the complex.
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is handling the investigation and says it won’t be complete for several more months, partly because of the time it takes to get toxicology and results from testing done on Burroughs’ body, a BCI spokesperson said.
Lea Dotson, a member of the Committee for Justice for Matt, said Burroughs’ death and how police treated a white doctor at St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital suggest a difference in how black and white citizens are treated. Burroughs was black.
“Matthew Burroughs was shot in his car in the parking lot within 15 seconds,” Dotson said.
However, when a cardiologist at St. Elizabeth’s pulled a knife on hospital police about a week before Burroughs’ death, “somehow he lived to see the light of another day,” she said.
Officers in Niles and at St. Elizabeth’s “go to the same police academy. They are trained the exact same way. So it’s either one of two things. Either the Niles police officers are totally incompetent ... or something made them not see Matthew as deserving his day in court,” she said.
Another committee member, Blair Floyd of Niles, said he doesn’t think Niles police can successfully argue that they were justified in killing Burroughs on the grounds that Burroughs was using his car against them as a weapon.
“There is no way in that space he would have been able to use his car as a weapon,” he said, suggesting his car was moving slowly.
The organizers of the program asked Niles Police Department to send a representative to the meeting, but no one came, said Pastor Todd Johnson of Second Baptist, who served as host.
Many of the speakers expressed support for the requests made by the Trumbull County Chapter of the NAACP after Burroughs’ killing to be honored. Among them were for the U.S. Department of Justice “to launch a full criminal and ‘pattern and practice’ investigation into the shooting and other complaints within the Niles department,” and for more uniform standards of training officers in the use of force.
At the end of the program, many loaded a tour bus to travel to the Niles Police Department to deliver a letter.
Burroughs’ daughter, Jayla, 8, and her mother, Jennifer Cox, attended the event.