ATLANTA — Rayshard Brooks didn’t hide his history.
About five months before he was killed by Atlanta police in a Wendy’s parking lot — before his name and case would become the latest rallying point in a massive call for racial justice and equality nationwide — Brooks gave an interview to an advocacy group about his years of struggle in the criminal justice system. He described an agonizing cycle of job rejection and public shame over his record and association with a system that takes millions of Americans, many of them Black like him, away from their families and treats them more like animals than individuals.
“That’s a hard feeling to stomach,” he told the group Reconnect, as he lamented the lack of support, both in prison and once released. “Once you get in there, you know, you’re just in debt. … I’m out now, and I have to try to fend for myself … clueless of everything that’s been going on, I don’t know, I’m trying to adapt back to society.”
When he died June 12, Brooks seemed to finally be gaining firmer footing, family members and friends say. He was working to support his wife, three daughters and stepson. He planned eventually to move to Ohio, where he’d recently spent months getting to know his father and was an energetic and supportive co-worker at a construction company. Those close to him described him as always happy and smiling, ready to do anything — a silly dance or a cook-off — to make people laugh or defuse any tense situation.
He was a full-time carpenter and was regaining his kids’ trust, even starting to answer their questions about his time incarcerated, he said in the February Reconnect video.