john berman will be joining you along with don lemon. captions by vitac www.vitac.com it is hard to say good evening tonight, having seen the video footage authorities in memphis made public just a short time ago. i m john berman here in new york. and in memphis, i m don lemon. we appreciate you joining us for our special coverage. today, tyre nichols mom asked me a very simple question about her son s deadly encounter with police three weeks ago this weekend as a matter of fact. that question was, where was the humanity? three days later, her son would be dead from the beating he d received. ten days after that, five cops, members of a specialized now deactivated so-called spcorpion unit, were fired. yesterday all five were charged with murder. and now we have video of what they did, john. and this video comes from a variety of sources, body cams, a pole-mounted surveillance camera. we re not going to show any of it lightly. in truth, though, there is no amount of
tyre nichols, now, as we have been doing all evening, we have a warning, what you will see is a young man being beaten to death, it s graphic, the language is no less ugly as well. (screams) mom! what the use your hands. use your hands. give me your hands. give me your hands. again, what is most notable mentioning other things, done, amongst the brutality if you re trying to figure out who s calm, it appears to be tyre nichols there. it is the officers who have there emotions you know, at 11 or more there and seem to be escalating the situation almost every step of the way. it wasn t, sir, can you show me your license and registration. they went from 0 to 100 in less than five seconds or just immediately and john be what we saw there, that was the first video, that was the beginning as we know it gets much, much worse after that. i m sorry i m sorry, that was a little bit later but it did get worse after that because we so he tyre nichols they propped him up
police have permanently disbanded the s.c.o.r.p.i.o.n. unit, the unit associated with officers involved in the killing of tyre nichols, the 29-year-old man beaten after a traffic stop. the videos we re about to show you are graphic and disturbing, but of course they are critical to understanding what happened to this 29-year-old man. as you can hear in the video, nichols cries out for his mother, who was just a few blocks away. officers continued to hit and spray nichols, struggling with him on the ground. more footage appears to show inaction by deputies and officers and paramedics on the scene. five officers are facing multiple charges, including second-degree murder and kidnapping. two sheriff s deputies at the scene were placed on leave pending an investigation and cnn s shimon prokupecz is live. we ll talk about the horrific video in just a moment, but we do have new breaking news, information coming in this afternoon, and that is that the memphis police department has
cnn has confirmed multiple contradictions, including claims that nichols grabbed an officer s gun which was heard in one of the body camera recordings released last week by one of the officers talking about it, but it s not visible on the video. you were going for my gun too, so i m, like he grabbed my gun. look. got him out the car and i was, like, hey, bro. you good? he swung and hit me. he reached for my gun and slammed into the car. so far, ten city employees have faced consequences in the wake of nichols killing. of the latest, two emts and a fire department lieutenant have now been fired. that s three in the fire department and a seventh memphis officer has been relieved of duty last week. five of those seven officers were charged with second-degree murder and assault for nichols death. cnn s ryan young has the latest from memphis. also here, cnn chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst, john miller. ryan, first, the discrepancies between the video and t