Family, friends and activists held a celebration for life on Nov. 24 for Ta’Kiya Young, a 21-year-old pregnant Black mother who was fatally shot by an on-duty police officer.
The celebration occurred days after Blendon Township, Ohio, police officer Connor Grubb, who killed Ms. Young and her unborn daughter in a supermarket parking lot on Aug. 24, 2023, was acquitted of all charges, including murder.
After the verdict, issued in court on Nov. 21, Ms. Young’s grandmother, Nadine Young, collapsed into sobs, according to The Associated Press. She shouted, “It’s not right! This is not right!”
“Her life mattered. We’re here because it mattered, and can’t no Blendon, no judge, no jury, nobody can’t say her life didn’t matter. It mattered. She was important. She was somebody and that baby was somebody. I don’t care what they say,” Nadine Young said at the community gathering.
Since the verdict, community activists have also held rallies demanding justice.
Attorney Sean Walton, who represents the family, criticized Blendon Township for failing to exhibit empathy and respect toward the family. The family is pursuing a civil lawsuit.
“They’ll have to answer to the way they operate in our lawsuit, because we believe that there’s a total disregard for families like Ta’Kiya’s,” Atty. Walton said at the gathering. He argued that Officer Grubb violated department policy and should be terminated.
“Every citizen of Blendon Township should feel less safe if he’s on the streets,” he said.
Atty. Robert Gresham, a civil rights attorney for the estate of Ta’Kiya Young, described the trial’s outcome as a legal one and not a moral one.
“That doesn’t change the truth. The reality is, a pregnant Black woman and her unborn daughter were killed during what we consider a preventable police encounter that never should have turned deadly,” he said to The Final Call. “The criminal trial is over, but the civil case is going to continue in the civil court.”
The deadly police encounter came after Ms. Young, who was approximately seven months pregnant, was suspected of shoplifting by a store employee. In body camera footage, an officer told Ms. Young to get out of the car.
A second officer, Grubb, stood in front of the car with one hand on the car’s hood and the other pointing a gun at Ms. Young. Ms. Young then turned the steering wheel and slowly inched the car forward. In the footage, she is heard asking, “Are you going to shoot me?” Officer Grubb fired his weapon, striking Ms. Young in the chest.
“Grubb put himself in a situation that he didn’t need to. He escalated the situation that didn’t need to be escalated, and he’s the reason why everybody was placed in the position they were. He had the opportunity to remove himself from that situation.
He didn’t,” Atty. Gresham said. “The evidence showed that he wasn’t in harm’s way. There’s a signal, her right turn signal that’s on. You can visibly see her through his body camera footage turning her wheel to the right, away from him, and the car is not moving fast.”
In addition, the department’s use-of-force policy advises officers to move away from moving vehicles rather than using a weapon.
“From a police practices perspective, you’re putting people in more danger, because once you shoot somebody who’s driving a car, the car is not going to stop. It’s going to keep going. So the idea that shooting someone is somehow putting you in a safer position, that’s counterintuitive,” Atty. Gresham said.
He summed the case up as just one situation in a long pattern of America’s “devaluing Black motherhood.”
“We can’t talk about police violence without talking about Black women, Black folks’ safety, Black maternal safety, Black families,” he said. “We have the right to survive routine interactions. There’s nothing about what occurred prior to that that meant that Ta’Kiya and her daughter, her unborn daughter, should have been sentenced to death.”
Officer Grubb faced four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault and two counts of involuntary manslaughter. Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge David Young, who is of no relation to Ms. Young, dropped four of the counts.
Officer Grubb was indicted in August 2024 and pleaded not guilty to all charges. He had been on paid administrative leave until June of this year and was put back on paid leave after the verdict. He did not testify at the trial and only issued a written statement.
“The character of Ta’Kiya Young was run through the mud, whereas anything regarding the history and the past of Connor Grubb was not allowed inside of the courtroom,” Ramon Obey II, a community organizer in Columbus, Ohio, said to The Final Call.
Ms. Young, who was preparing to give birth to her daughter, was an aspiring social worker and mother of two boys, who are now five and eight. Her sons are being raised by her grandmother, Nadine Young.
“She treated her boys like gold, and she always was doing everything she could to provide for her kids and take care of them boys,” Nadine Young told ABC News Live in an interview on Nov. 26. “She was just a young mother trying to make it by. And she was just a light, a bright light in our life.”
Atty. Gresham hopes the civil action will show Ms. Young’s sons that the lives of their mother and unborn sister mattered. “They need to know that the system can’t kill a Black woman and walk away unchanged,” he said.
The Young family is just one Black family out of many that continue to suffer the effects of deadly police encounters. The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam, demanded that the U.S. government put an end to police brutality and mob attacks against Black people.
In Point No. 6 of “The Muslim Program,” of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad in “What The Muslims Want,” it states: “We want an immediate end to the police brutality and mob attacks against the so-called Negro throughout the United States.
We believe that the Federal government should intercede to see that Black men and women tried in White courts receive justice in accordance with the laws of the land—or allow us to build a new nation for ourselves, dedicated to justice, freedom and liberty.”
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, has spent his life fighting for Black people and the oppressed and has spoken extensively about policing in America.
During an interview with Cliff Kelley, former host of WVON’s 1690 AM talk show, on June 11, 2015, Minister Farrakhan recounted the statement by J.B. Stoner, who was Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan: “We are going to give up wearing the hood and the garment of the Ku Klux Klan, but soon we will be in the police departments of America, we will be judges, we will be bankers.”
Now, “The police are the lowest on the socio-economic rung of the tyranny that Black people face,” Minister Farrakhan said.
A continued pattern
Blendon Township is in Franklin County, Ohio, and is about 16 miles from Columbus, Ohio, the capital city. More than half of Franklin County’s population is White, and about 23 percent is Black.
The county has had a slew of high-profile police brutality cases since 2020. At least 20 out of the 35 people killed by police in Franklin County from 2020 to 2025 were Black, according to the Mapping Police Violence database by Campaign Zero, an organization fighting to end police violence.
Out of the 20 incidents, 16 of the officers were not charged, including Columbus police officer Nicholas Reardon, who killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in 2021.
“We see the same old pattern, the same chain, over and over. You see the encounter happen, then you see escalation, then you see lethal force in what we see as the legal ambiguity, and then we see the institutional defensiveness,” Columbus native DaVante’ Goins, founder and chief executive officer of Kin Worldwide, a Black-owned digital media and tech ecosystem, said to The Final Call.
Of the four officers charged, including Officer Grubb, who has now been acquitted, former Columbus police officer Adam Coy has been the only officer sentenced. Mr. Coy killed 47-year-old Andre Hill in December 2020 and was sentenced to 15 years to life in July
The other two officers, former Franklin County Sheriff’s deputy Jason Meade, who killed 23-year-old Casey Goodson Jr. in December 2020, and former Columbus police officer Ricky Anderson, who killed 20-year-old Donovan Lewis in 2022, are awaiting trial.
Mr. Meade’s second trial is scheduled for January 26, 2026, after the jury in his February 24, 2024 trial was unable to reach a verdict, resulting in a retrial.
Recently, 18-year-old Ta’Shawn Davis was killed by an unnamed Columbus police sergeant in October.
Mr. Goins posed the question, “Where do we go from here?”
“This is nothing new. Time and time again and time and time again, we see this happen, and it’s become a case study here in Columbus, Ohio,” he said. “But what are we going to do as Black America to now go beyond this to build our own systems?”
In his message on WVON, Minister Farrakhan argued against the idea of “retraining” police.
“Don’t come to us with this lie that you’re going to ‘re-train the police.’ … No, you train them to do exactly what they are doing,” he said. “What are you going to re-train them with? You can’t train a racist mind that has an attitude that we are ‘animals,’ that the Black community is a ‘jungle.’”
“If that’s the way you think, you can’t come in here! We will police our own community, teach and train Black men how to love and respect each other—and you should back us up in that,” he added, addressing the U.S. government.
“Because if you can’t train yours, we will train ours; and you step back and let us police our own community. And we’ll do a better job of it than sending murderers in to exact pain and retribution on us for being the children of slaves and being put in a savage state.”