Supporters of unarmed Black man killed by Aurora officer commandeer city council meeting

AURORA | Protesters twice forced Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman to halt Monday’s city council meeting and step out of the room as they screamed, taunted and chanted at lawmakers, accusing them of indifference to the shooting of Kilyn Lewis by Aurora police last month.

Lewis’ family, friends and dozens of supporters responded indignantly to the council’s attempts to control the crowd, which included voting not to extend the time period set aside for public comment to accommodate all of the members of the group who had signed up to speak.

“You want to go home, but so did my nephew,” Lewis’ aunt, Gena Simien, yelled from the audience. “I watched him go down in the ground. I watched him be put in a coffin.”

Kilyn Lewis’ funeral service and burial were held June 13, two and a half weeks after he was fatally shot during an arrest by Aurora SWAT officer Michael Dieck.

Lewis was wanted for attempted first-degree murder in connection with a drive-by shooting that wounded a man in Denver in May.

Officers confronted Lewis at a condominium complex in Aurora on May 23 and surrounded him with their rifles raised. As Lewis lifted his hands, one of which held a cellphone, he was fatally shot once in the torso by Dieck.

On Monday, while talking about Lewis and other unarmed Black men injured and killed by police, Lewis’ family and supporters lifted their hands and cellphones into the air as an homage to the 37-year-old and his apparent gesture of surrender.

“Together, we can make sure this does not continue to happen in our community,” local activist Candice Bailey said during a rally held on the west steps of the Aurora Municipal Building prior to the meeting, where supporters prayed and talked about the importance of protesting the killings of unarmed Black men.

“We may not agree on everything, but the one thing we do agree on wholeheartedly, otherwise you wouldn’t be here today, is that this is wrong. Kilyn Lewis should be here today,” Bailey said.

Monday’s rally and demonstration inside of the Paul Tauer Council Chamber was the latest reaction to the Aurora Police Department’s release last week of segments of body-worn camera footage that showed the shooting of Lewis and included narration by interim police chief Heather Morris, who acknowledged Lewis did not have a weapon.

Morris declined to comment after the council meeting, where speaker after speaker characterized Lewis’ death as an act of unnecessary, racist violence.

“The police chief’s response was to thank her officers for their hard work, a move that deflects from the fact that another unarmed Black man was killed,” Aurora resident Maria McComb said. “Kilyn Lewis had a family that loved him, and they deserved to see him given a fair trial. The pattern of violence against Black men must end.”

The demonstrators also criticized council members for what they described as a lack of meaningful oversight of the city’s police department. They called for Dieck to be criminally charged and fired, though the city’s charter bars the council from unilaterally firing police officers or any city employees apart from a handful of top officials.

“We’re getting executed. We are. Yet, y’all do nothing about it,” said Kilyn Lewis’ brother, Kiawa, while addressing the council. “We’re getting tired. We are. The thing is, when we become silent, it’s something that y’all need to start worrying about. When y’all don’t hear us no more, get very concerned. Right now is our forewarning.”

After the protesters had left, Councilmember Stephanie Hancock, who is Black and was singled out for criticism throughout the night, said the council is limited in its ability to directly take action against the officers involved in the shooting.

She also pushed back on the conduct of protesters, saying she supported the public’s right to address the council but that there was “an appropriate way and a respectful way to do that.”

“To take over this chamber, to disrespect this body, to disrespect the process, I find it very disturbing that we’d do that,” she said. “We diminish ourselves, and we fall into anarchy, and then we have activists and others who, really, their mission is to dismantle, disrupt and destroy.”

After entering the council chamber, demonstrators sat with their hands raised until City Clerk Kadee Rodriguez called on those who had signed up to speak.

Mayor Mike Coffman opened the public comment portion of the meeting by asking attendees to be respectful and mentioning how the council’s rules limit open public comment to one hour by default, a time limit that he said the council would not vote to extend.

When Councilmember Alison Coombs asked whether the decision not to extend the time had been “predetermined,” Coffman said he would not support allowing open public comment to continue for more than an hour.

As speakers took turns at the lectern, they were cheered by the crowd and led the group in chants of “no justice, no peace” and “say his name: Kilyn Lewis.”

Speakers jeered the mayor’s attempts to enforce the three-minutes-per-person limit on public comments, and numerous people yelled at the council from the audience throughout the meeting.

When one meeting attendee who was not a part of the group, Robbie De Jonge, tried to address demonstrators from the lectern, she was heckled and yelled at, at which point Coffman was unable to regain control of the meeting and left the room.

Several council members — including Coombs, Danielle Jurinsky, Angela Lawson, Ruben Medina, Crystal Murillo and Dustin Zvonek — remained as former Denver Public Schools board member Auon’tai Anderson and others led the group in protest chants.

The mayor returned after several minutes and informed De Jonge that the council’s rules dictated that public commenters should address the council rather than other members of the public. She finished her comments as the group continued to mock and heckle her.

Because open public comment is limited to an hour, after the hour had elapsed, Coombs moved to allow more members of the public to speak, which fellow progressive Murillo seconded.

“They were here two weeks ago; they’ll be here in another two weeks,” Coffman said.

“They’re here right now. They took the time to come here right now,” Coombs replied.

Hancock moved to immediately end debate on Coombs’ motion, which the majority of the council supported before voting against Coombs’ original motion to allow more speakers to address the council.

The meeting once again ground to a halt as demonstrators marched down to the floor of the council chamber and resumed chanting, prompting the mayor and many council members to leave.

Some demonstrators sat on the floor in front of the dais, and the group discussed continuing the meeting on their own terms with additional speakers before they were told the council had agreed to grant them additional time.

Council members returned, and this time, the majority voted to allow the remaining handful of speakers to address the council.

After close to two hours of public comment, the protesters filed out once the final speaker — Lewis’ mother, LaRonda Jones — finished her remarks, chanting as they left.

Yelling toward the council on her way out of the chamber, community activist Candice Bailey promised the group would return at the council’s next meeting.

While Coombs told her council colleagues that she planned to sponsor a resolution formally apologizing to Lewis’ family, council members avoided replying to the taunting and criticism by demonstrators.

After the meeting, Coffman told the Sentinel that, in the same way Lewis’ family was concerned about Kilyn Lewis being deprived of due process when he was shot and killed, the public should care about Dieck being investigated without interference.

The shooting is currently under investigation by the police department’s Internal Investigations Bureau as well as the third-party 18th Judicial District Critical Incident Response Team, which has the power to recommend criminal charges for Dieck if it determines charges are warranted.

“I certainly feel for the family. It’s a tragedy their son died,” the mayor said. “There was an allegation of what he did, just like there’s an allegation of what this police officer did. It’s a horrible situation that the police officer is in, having to make a split-second decision. Was it right, or was it wrong? That’s what the investigation is going to find out.”

Many of the speakers on Monday described Lewis’ death as murder, and some questioned whether the local criminal justice system is capable of investigating the incident impartially, bringing up how the police department’s Force Review Board had initially cleared the officers involved in the death of Elijah McClain.

“A corrupt department investigating itself will never find its wrongdoings,” said Nate Kassa, an Aurora resident and community organizer, demanding along with other speakers that the city release the unedited bodycam footage of the shooting.

“The time for investigations is over,” he said. “It’s long over.”