I used to believe in the American dream. Then the police killed my son

The Guardian

3 days ago

Kelly Ghaisar never thought to teach her son, Bijan, to fear the police. She didn't see the need. After arriving in the US as a young girl fleeing the Iranian revolution in 1979, she had led a charmed life in her adopted country, building a prosperous and happy family with her husband and raising her two children – Bijan and his older sister, Nageen – to believe in the American dream.
'We had just lived our life in this bubble, this very lovely bubble,' she says. 'Even though we're both from Iran, we never felt we had to teach our kids that they were different. They were American and we taught them to believe that they were equal and free, the values we thought this country stood for. I never thought that Bijan, a young man of colour, would need to know what to do if he encountered the police. We taught him they were there to protect him, not that he would ever have to protect himself from them.'
Now, she says, she knows better. 'But of course, it's too late.'
Over the years, the details of Bijan's death have been told again and again: in court documents, newspaper articles and TV news broadcasts. Online, there are dozens of photos of Kelly, standing on courthouse steps surrounded by family members holding pictures of her son. Yet every time she recounts the details of the night he was killed, she tells it as if she were there, right next to him, watching helplessly as the final, tragic chapter of his young life played out.
On Friday 17 November 2017, 25-year-old Bijan, who worked in his father's accounting firm, was in his Jeep Grand Cherokee driving along the George Washington Memorial Parkway in northern Virginia, just across the river from Washington DC, when he was rear-ended by an Uber driver. After the accident, Bijan didn't stop – Kelly doesn't know why – and the passenger inside the Uber called 911 to report the incident and said that Bijan had fled the scene.
The 911 dispatcher put out a call identifying his vehicle and he was spotted by Lucas Vinyard and Alejandro Amaya, two DC park police (a federal law enforcement agency) officers, who started a pursuit. They were joined by a police car from Fairfax county, Virginia, which recorded what followed.
The park police officers pulled Bijan's car over, got out of their vehicle and approached him, their guns raised and pointing into his car.
Kelly thinks that Bijan panicked. 'Before he was killed, he had never been in trouble, had never even had a speeding ticket,' she says. 'And suddenly he was in this very frightening situation and he was very, very afraid of guns. He had an almost pathological fear of them. I know my child and I know he would have been terrified.'
In the video footage of the encounter, which Fairfax county police released a few months after Bijan's death, you can see Bijan's Jeep driving away and then stopping a second time and Amaya running to the vehicle with his gun drawn, banging it against the window. Bijan drives off again and there is a short chase before he pulls over again and the park police stop in front of his Jeep.
As Bijan's car rolls slowly forward, Amaya jumps out of his car with his gun unholstered and fires repeatedly through the windshield. Bijan's car begins to roll into a ditch as Amaya is joined by Vinyard and then they shoot into the car again. After the car stops, Amaya reholsters his gun, before pulling his weapon out again and firing through the windshield. 'They just kept firing,' says Kelly quietly. 'They shot my son, who was unarmed, 10 times in the head at close range. The whole incident from start to finish took less than 10 minutes.'
Across town, Kelly and her husband, James, were at home with no idea that their lives as they had known them had come to an end. 'Everything was great, the kids were great, it was all perfect,' she says. 'I was an interior designer, James was an accountant, we had a beautiful home.' That night, 'the whole thing fell apart.'
At 1am two park police officers knocked on the front door. From the very first interaction, Kelly knew things were wrong. They told the couple that there had been a shootout and Bijan was in the hospital. 'Like some gangster thing happened,' says Kelly. 'And I said: 'A shootout? That's not possible.' Because Bijan was so anti-gun, he would never have had a gun in his car. So from those very first moments they were lying to us.'
The officers gave the Ghaisars their card and told them to call them when they got to the hospital. 'And we never saw them again,' says Kelly. 'They never, ever picked up the phone when we tried to call.'
When they arrived at the hospital, they were told that Bijan was in a coma, hovering between life and death.
'I said: 'I want to see my son.' And the doctor said: 'I'm sorry, you can't,'' says Kelly. The hospital staff told them they had received an email from the park police saying nobody should be let into Bijan's room.
'We were all so shocked. The hospital said it had never happened before. Nobody in the police told us what had happened to our child but they had armed officers guarding his body.'
Kelly says: '100% there was racism there, all the way through. It just felt like: 'He's this Middle Eastern guy, we shot him, end of story. You don't have the same rights as everybody else.''
Kelly and her husband and daughter stayed at the hospital, sleeping on air beds in a waiting room for the 10 days it took Bijan to die. During that time they were only allowed to see their son once an hour for a few minutes at a time and they were never allowed to hold him. 'He was in a coma but they said that he was evidence and we couldn't touch him.'
Photos of Bijan published after his death show a relaxed young man, grinning into the camera. 'He was a special person,' says Kelly, with maternal pride. 'Everybody thought so. He had this huge heart, was so considerate and generous and so handsome. His whole life was ahead of him.' Her last memories of her son are of 'his beautiful face just completely destroyed. When they took off the bandages, they had shot off one of his ears, his nose was severed, his eyes were swollen. He was unrecognisable.'
With everything that has happened since, Kelly says what seemed at the time like pointless cruelty now makes sense. 'They wanted us to suffer,' she says. 'They wanted us to be scared. They wanted us to know their power.'
Switching off Bijan's life support was 'the hardest decision that I will ever make in my life, even though we knew that there was nothing we could do to bring him back, that he was never going to recover,' she says. 'But I did not want my son, whatever was left of him, to be in the grip of these people. They weren't allowed to be near him any more.'
Bijan's death was, Kelly says, 'not just a loss. It was an absolute catastrophe. An obliteration.' The family lost more than their son that day: 'We lost our faith in our country, our government. We saw that nothing, absolutely nothing we had believed about our country was true. That the system we thought was there to protect us was now going to fight us to protect their own people and we would be the only ones calling for justice for Bijan.'
In the seven and a half years since Bijan's death, Kelly and her family have relentlessly fought the US government for accountability. She says that at every turn it has been denied.
'When you are fighting the federal government and they close ranks, there is nowhere to go,' she says. 'The park police are federal police. The FBI is a federal department. The courts are there to protect the federal government. There is no way to get justice if the justice department is against you.'
The family spent two years waiting for an FBI investigation into Bijan's shooting before the justice department announced it would not file federal charges against the two officers.
For 16 months, Kelly says, the park police refused to identify the officers who shot Bijan or release any information about the case until the Ghaisars filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit in 2018. When Amaya and Vinyard eventually took the stand, they said they shot Bijan in self-defence. In 2023 the civil suit was settled for $5m.
The Ghaisars' long fight has not been without flares of hope. In 2020 a Fairfax grand jury indicted Vinyard and Amaya for manslaughter, which Kelly says 'felt like a turning point'. Then, in October 2021, a federal judge dismissed all criminal charges against the officers on the basis of qualified immunity laws, which protect government workers from prosecution for actions taken within their official capacity if it can't be proved that they violated constitutional or statutory rights or acted with 'malicious intent'.
'The judge said that these two men were fine police officers and what they did was 'necessary and proper',' says Kelly. 'This is how our system works, that a judge can write these words about the killing of an unarmed 25-year-old man. That it was necessary and proper.'
Amaya and Vinyard were put on paid leave after Bijan's death. In January this year, in a huge blow to the Ghaisar family, they went back to work at the park police. 'Which didn't surprise me but did disgust us all,' says Kelly. She says she will never accept that this is the end. 'I will not stop fighting for Bijan, not while I still live and breathe.'
In 2018 the family started the Bijan Ghaisar Foundation to support organisations fighting gun violence and police brutality, and to lobby for stricter gun protection laws. In particular, Kelly has become an impassioned campaigner against qualified immunity. 'This is my number one goal, my life mission,' she says. 'I'm not naive any more – I know this probably won't happen in my lifetime – but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop for a second.'
Although Bijan's photos are still all over their house and Kelly visits his grave every day, the old family traditions – the movie nights, the identical festive pyjama sets – have gone. 'When my daughter and son-in-law are around for the holidays, we all sit down, get out our laptops and strategise the next steps for our foundation,' she says. 'This is what we do together now.'
She is no longer the same person, she says. 'The person I was before Bijan was killed has completely gone. She is gone. When you bring a life into the world and nurture that life and watch it grow into something as special as our son was, to see it just taken away so thoughtlessly, so pointlessly – it could have broken me for good. But I've found a fire and a strength within me that I never thought was there, and that is down to Bijan and my love for him.'
She has survived thanks to her friends, her family and her activism. 'But number one is Bijan. He is the force holding me up, giving me strength and light and love to do what I'm trying to do.' People ask her how she hasn't been corroded away by bitterness, grief or rage. 'And I say: Bijan would not want that. Any negative energy was wrong to him, so I'm just channelling his spirit every day, and every day I get stronger. Because this is what Bijan would want me to do. Never give up.'
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