The skate park around them was quickly filling up with people. In the end, more than 100 people showed up at a memorial for Nichols, a 29-year-old man killed by police in Memphis, where he moved in 2020. to stand trial on charges of murder. The sixth one is disqualified. The unit they were in was disbanded. Video of the brutal beating went viral, but most of Nichols' old team said they tried to avoid it. Nichols joins a long list of names tagged with hashtags made famous by police violence, but for friends who knew him for a long time, his death is not a rallying cry but a poignant and intimate pain.
“Sometimes when I think about him, I hurt so much that I try to just sleep it off,” Williams said.
“I'd like to see more of him,” Danforth said.
“As you get older, sometimes it's hard to stay connected,” Alex Wilson said, lighting a candle under his cupped hand to block the breeze.
Away from the news cameras and the crowd gathered in the center of the park, the camera crew gathered behind a large ramp at the far edge, placing candles in a tight circle along its base. Wrapping their arms around each other, they clung to each other in shimmering warmth, memories flooding back with a flood of nostalgia.
“This place was the best, man,” Ryan Wilson said, looking around the ramps where he first learned to skate.
“Anyone who showed up here was part of the family,” Danforth said.
Danforth and Alex Wilson were the first of the team to move into the unit in Natomas, a sprawling, flat Sacramento suburb that stretches from the airport to downtown. When their families arrived in the early 2000s, much of the area, including Regency Park, was still under construction, part of a housing boom sweeping the empty meadows north of the city.
Conveniently located at the intersection of Interstates 5 and 80—two of Northern California's major arteries—Natomas offered easy access to downtown at an affordable price, attracting first-time homebuyers from across the region and from a wide range of classes and ethnicities.
As more houses were built, more young families moved in. Tire Nichols and his father arrived about five months after Danforth and Alex Wilson. Three teenagers explored their unfinished neighborhood together. Sometimes they walked on the wooden frames of future houses, trying to shoot each other with airsoft guns. They most often met in Regency Park, which at the time was simply fields of dirt surrounding a construction zone that workers covered with a tarp each evening when they finished work. A skate park was being formed under a tarp. Danforth, Alex Wilson and Nichols were new skateboarders, and after the construction workers left, they would pull down the tarps and test their moves on the newly installed ramps and rails.
