This is the story of a father’s grief at losing his son to a policeman’s bullet. It happened two decades before Ferguson, Baltimore, Tamir Rice, or Eric Garner, and it received little or no national attention.
In 1994, Nicholas Naquan Heyward Jr. was a 13-year-old living in Brooklyn, NY. One day, he and his friends were playing with toy guns in the stairwell of their housing complex when an NYPD officer shot and killed him.
20 years after his death, his father, Nicholas Heyward Sr. (pictured above), came to StoryCorps to remember his son, pictured at left the year before he was killed.
Originally aired May 15, 2015, on NPR’s Morning Edition.