MEMPHIS, Tenn. — He was an amateur photographer who loved skateboarding and watching sunsets darken the woods and ponds of his adopted hometown.
He enjoyed his mom’s sesame seed chicken and greeted her and his stepfather, Rodney Wells, when he got home with a hearty “Hello, parents!”
Those words won’t be heard anymore from Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who was hospitalized in critical condition and died three days after a Jan. 7 traffic stop.
“Nobody’s perfect, OK, but he was damn near,” his mother, RowVaughn Wells, said at a news conference Monday.
Nichols, the youngest of four children, had a 4-year-old son. He was visiting his family in Memphis from his home in Sacramento, California, when the pandemic started, so he stayed put and got a job working the overnight shift for FedEx.
When he wasn’t working or taking photos, he was skateboarding, an activity he started when he was 6 years old, Wells said.
“That was his passion,” she said at the news conference, three days before…
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