Minneapolis police are searching for the gunman who fatally shot a community activist just outside his mother’s home.
According to WCCO-TV, Tyrone Williams, 33, was killed Tuesday night at around 6 p.m., just as he was leaving his mother’s home. A car was seen fleeing the scene after Williams was shot, and police are asking anyone with information to contact them.
“He helped a lot of people as much as he could,” Rosemary Williams, Tyrone’s mother, told the news station.
Rosemary Williams said that she knew her son was a people person who liked to help others, but did not realize how many he had helped until now.
“He was up at the reservation with the Natives, fighting over the oil. I heard from their community; it’s just a blessing, the outpouring. I didn’t know he impacted so many people,” the grieving mother said.
Tyrone Williams was active in the calls for justice in the police-shooting deaths of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile, and active in protests over the deportations of immigrants and the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, MPR News notes.
The civil rights activist was also a father of four.
“He did a lot of good stuff. He was brave, he was a hero,” Ade Williams, 9, told WCCO of his father.
“Make him be proud of me what I’m doing, helping people. That’s stuff that he wants me to do,” Ade’s brother Talib, 10, added.
Rosemary Williams, in the meantime, wants justice for her son, the sort of justice that comes from love and community.
“We need to embrace each other; we have to embrace these children, these young men that don’t have love and don’t know how to love so they hurt themselves and others,” she said. “We are not going to allow them to destroy themselves or each other. It’s going to stop.”
Tyrone Williams had a clothing line called Black Coalition, which his friends plan to keep going until his children are old enough to take over.