lit a candle 4h agoSaw this on the local news out of Columbus while I was half asleep on the couch, 20 years old and shot in his own bed holding a vape pen. Been thinking about it for days.
Their story
Donovan Lewis was a 20 year old biracial Black man from Columbus, Ohio, who was shot and killed by a Columbus police officer in his own bedroom in the early hours of August 30, 2022. He had no public career or body of work; he became known to the wider…
Donovan Lewis was a 20 year old biracial Black man from Columbus, Ohio, who was shot and killed by a Columbus police officer in his own bedroom in the early hours of August 30, 2022. He had no public career or body of work; he became known to the wider world only through the circumstances of his death, which turned him into one of a string of names associated with questions about how American police use deadly force in people's homes.
Lewis was asleep in his apartment in the Hilltop neighborhood when officers of the Columbus Division of Police arrived before dawn to serve a warrant accusing him of assault, improper handling of a firearm, and domestic violence against his pregnant girlfriend. After knocking for several minutes, officers detained two other men inside the apartment, then sent in a police dog, which went to the door of Lewis's bedroom. Officer Ricky Anderson, a thirty year veteran of the department, opened the door and fired a single shot almost immediately, hitting Lewis as he lay in bed. Police later said Lewis had been holding a vape pen, though body camera video released the same day did not clearly show one in his hands.
The shooting mattered because it happened so quickly, in a private bedroom, against a young man who did not appear to be an immediate threat on the footage that was made public. It arrived less than two years after Columbus police killed Casey Goodson and Andre Hill, two other Black men whose deaths had already drawn scrutiny to the department, and it was absorbed into a broader national argument over how warrants are served and when officers are justified in using lethal force.
Lewis died at a hospital after officers and paramedics attempted CPR at the scene. The Franklin County Coroner's Office later ruled his death a homicide, finding he had been shot once in the abdomen and died within minutes. His death set off protests in Columbus, a civil lawsuit against the officers involved, and a criminal case against Anderson that took years to resolve, ending in a guilty plea and a sentence of probation in the autumn of 2026.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the sources cited on this page; death reported by The CW Columbus.
Photos
1by People Forever
same, it stuck with me too