The 2020 police killing of Manuel "Manny" Ellis, a Black man in Tacoma, brought a reckoning to Washington State and has set up what promises to be one of the highest-profile trials in Pacific Northwest history.
The story unfolds in The Walk Home, a podcast by KNKX Public Radio and The Seattle Times, with support from NPR. It's sponsored by MovetoTacoma.com, the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation, and the Group Health Foundation.
Find more information at thewalkhomepodcast.org.
Links to source materials
Dive deeper into this story and our reporting.
Death while in custody 3/3/20 scanner audio: Here's a 12-minute audio recording of the police scanner from the night Manny Ellis was killed, posted to The Tacompton Files. Note: This includes violent content.
"Man dies minutes after arrest for hitting Tacoma patrol car, struggling with police:" This article, published March 4, 2020, in The News Tribune, reports the death in policy custody but does not identify Manny Ellis.
Why the Left Will Continue to Lose on Homelessness: In this piece in the Stranger, writer and filmmaker Charles Mudede, mentions an African ghost story about a man eternally walking home. He tells the story as part of our podcast.
Transcript
Note: The Walk Home was produced as an audio series. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the series. This transcript is provided for reference only and may contain typos. Please confirm accuracy before quoting.
Episode 1: “Two Seconds of Audio”
Mayowa Aina: This podcast includes descriptions of violence and death. Please take care while listening.
Archival (Monèt Carter-Mixon at protest): “I’m live.”
Crowd: (Faintly protesting)
Aina: It’s late May, 2020. Tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of people are waving signs and marching through cities across America.
Archival (Carter-Mixon at protest): “No peace!
Aina: They’re protesting.
Archival (Carter-Mixon at protest): “Police!”
Aina: One crowd moves through Downtown Tacoma, Washington, under a gray Pacific Northwest sky.
Crowd: (Protesting gets louder)
Aina: A woman in a black hoodie, a little apart from the crowd, follows the sound of the chanting.
Archival (Unknown at protest): “They can’t see who you are.”
Archival (Carter-Mixon at protest): “Monèt .”
Archival (Unknown at protest): “How you doing?”
Archival (Carter-Mixon at protest): “You don’t got your face covered or nothing, cuz.”
Aina: Monèt Carter-Mixon gets closer to the heart of the action, weaving through the crowd.
Archival (Carter-Mixon at protest): “I’m like getting emotional and shit. I can’t even do it.”
Aina: For many of them, this protest is about the death of George Floyd, 17-hundred miles away, in Minneapolis. To Monèt , this protest is an opportunity.
She asks people marching around her if they know about something that happened right here in Tacoma, three months earlier, to a different Black man.
Crowd: (Chanting “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”)
Carter-Mixon: “If you guys, like, saw anything, heard anything, know anybody that saw anything, heard anything, message me, hit me up. I know you don't want to talk to the police. But contact me. Like let me know.”
Archival (Carter-Mixon at protest): “We should have brought a picture or something.”
Carter-Mixon: “I saw someone with his picture up. I was like, ‘Do you know who that is?’ And then she was like, ‘No.’”
“I was like, ‘That's my brother. He was killed.”
Aina: Monèt ’s older brother, Manuel Ellis - everybody called him Manny - was walking home one night when he crossed paths with police on a Tacoma street corner. He died there. That’s all Monèt really knows. So she came to the protest looking for answers, to try and figure out what the hell happened that night.
Carter-Mixon: “‘Do you know anybody that saw anything?’ Like, that's what I was doing. And I had spoke to everybody like in the crowd and I just said, like, ‘If you guys know anybody that lives in the area, if you know what happened, like, just… just hit me up.”
Crowd: (Chanting “No justice! No peace!”)
Aina: Monèt doesn’t know how long this moment will last. But, all of a sudden the deaths of Black people at the hands of police are international news. They’ve become symbols of these deep, pervasive problems in society. For whatever reason, lots of people are paying attention to George Floyd’s death.
Maybe, Monèt thinks, they’ll pay attention to Manny’s too. If she can find a way to take advantage of this moment, she has a chance at figuring out the truth about how Manny died.
From KNKX Public Radio and The Seattle Times, this is The Walk Home.
—
Mayowa Aina: I’m Mayowa Aina. I grew up here in Tacoma.
I think most people can remember where they were when they heard about George Floyd - maybe they saw the viral video. I heard about it, but I didn’t want to see it. To this day I still haven’t. I’ve never needed to.
My mind was already full of stories of Black children, men, and women being killed or brutalized. First, I learned about them as historical events, like Emmett Till. Then I inherited stories from my parents about Rodney King and from my older brothers about guys like Sean Bell.
Then I started collecting my own names. My first was Trayvon Martin.
Then Eric Garner.
Michael Brown.
Tamir Rice.
Sandra Bland.
By the time I’d heard about George Floyd I was tired. Really tired. Then I started seeing the name “Manny Ellis” come across my timeline. To be honest, by that point I wasn’t just tired, I was numb.
It wasn’t until I moved back home to Tacoma, and learned more about Manny from my friends, that I realized what actually happened. Manny’s death brought a reckoning to my hometown the way George Floyd’s killing did for America.
Jamika Scott: A lot of people here feel that Tacoma is really special. People think that Tacoma is sometimes immune from these things that happen in the world.
Davon White: I think it made people realize like, this shit really happens.
Rachel Askew: There was a dark cloud, like it felt very heavy, very dark, and very hard to avoid.
Jordan Bryant: It really set in for me that wow all of America is being affected by this that my own city is in danger, the people around me need protection.
Askew: You could feel our city crying, like weeping like it felt like very grieved, everything felt so grieved.
White: Because of that close knit feeling of Tacoma it was like okay that was somebody that I knew, or if I didn’t know him personally I knew his sister, or if I didn’t know his sister like I knew somebody who really loved him.
Scott: That combination of things was kind of a wake up call for people to be like, ‘Oh we have a problem here.’
Aina: But Manny’s story, this story that grieved my city, this wake up call, almost went unheard.
The only reason we know about this story is because of one woman. She challenged the media, the police department and local officials, the state government, even her own family at times, to get answers: Manny’s little sister Monèt . My colleague Kari Plog has spent two years reporting this story, and getting to know her.
Kari Plog: When I ask Monèt Carter-Mixon to describe herself, the first thing she says is:
Monèt Carter-Mixon: I’m a mom…
Plog: She has six kids. All of them are under 13.
Carter-Mixon: I’m kind of just a regular degular person. I’m not… I don’t feel like I’m anybody but that.
Plog: She was a single mom for a long time, but now she’s a newlywed. And her family is everything.
Carter-Mixon: I’m a homebody. I don’t really like to party or do any of that other stuff. I picked up hiking when I met my husband, which, I never thought in a million years that I would be a hiker but here I am.
Plog: What stands out about Monèt is how brutally honest she is. She doesn’t have time to dance around stuff. Even when she talks about horrible things. Especially when she talks about horrible things.
It kind of threw me off at first. Her tone doesn’t change much. She just shuts off her feelings and tells the facts. One of the few times she couldn’t shut them off was when I asked her about a phone call.
Plog: “I want to talk about that day. At any point in time, if there's something that you don't want to talk about or if you need to take a break, you just let me know, okay?”
Carter-Mixon: “Okay. Sorry, I'm getting emotional now. Oh, I hate this. The good, like, I don't mind talking about the good or just like our relationship because it helps me. Like it makes me feel like it’s real, it was genuine, like all of that. But then, like, the fucked up stuff, like what they did. I literally like, like last night, I had a nightmare.”
Plog: This phone call came in early March 2020, three months before she showed up at that protest looking for answers. George Floyd was still alive in Minneapolis. People were worried about a new coronavirus spreading around the world. Monèt was in her late twenties, trying to balance raising five kids on her own and a new job answering phones for a hospital system in Tacoma.
Carter-Mixon: “I was really stressed out because, you know, my kids are acting up in school. I was worried that I wasn't going to, because you know, they have probation periods with jobs. So I was worried like I wasn’t going to keep my job because I didn't have all the support that I needed. It was just, it was a lot.”
Plog: While she was at work, Monèt missed a call.
Archival (Voicemail recording): “Ma’am my name is Rich. I’m with the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office. You can give me a call at area code 253…”
Plog: Monèt had a newborn at home. She was breastfeeding and taking regular pumping breaks at work.
Carter-Mixon: “So on my way to go pump, I called him back and he, you know, he introduced himself. ‘Hi, my name's Rich. I'm from the Pierce County Medical Examiner's Office. Is now a good time to talk?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I'm at work, I'm getting ready to pump so I have time, yeah.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, you're at work? Are you in a safe place? Like, you're not driving or anything, are you?’ ‘No, like, why are you asking me if I'm driving?’ And he was like, ‘Well, I had I had your name as an emergency contact for a Manuel Ellis.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that's my brother.’”
“‘Is there a chair? Can you sit down?’ And I'm like, ‘What? Why are you asking me all these questions? Like, what do you, why are you calling me for? Dude, I'm trying to pump. Like, I'm on a schedule. I have stuff I have to do.’ He had said, ‘OK, well, I just want you to know that I have your brother's body here with me.’ ‘What?’”
“‘Your brother, he passed away early this morning.’ ‘What?’ Manny?!’”
Plog: Monèt doesn’t really remember what happened next. She thinks she threw her phone.
Carter-Mixon: “I don’t know. I flipped out. I was crying. I like fell to the ground, I know.”
“I'm pretty sure everyone's had their heart broken before. You know, like like your first love. That like pain, like in your chest where like, you just can't breathe. You can't eat. So imagine like that times 20. That’s what it feels like.”
Plog: First, she called her mom, Marcia.
Carter-Mixon: “I just said like, you know, ‘Manny’s gone.’ She’s like, ‘Gone? What do you mean gone? Gone where? What are you talking about? You're supposed to be at work. Why are you calling?’ And I'm like, ‘He's dead, Mom. He's dead. They just called me and said he's dead.’”
Plog: Monèt has another older brother, Matthew. She called him next.
Carter-Mixon: “He was angry. I remember he was like, ‘What are you talking about? What are you, what are you talking about?’ He was really really angry. And immediately, me and my brother were just like, like what, what happened?”
Plog: Manny was 33, older than Monèt . But she his sister had a reputation in the family, still does actually. They call her “the little big sister.”
Carter-Mixon: “I couldn't really be the baby because in like in a Black household, Black daughters, you don't get, especially firstborn Black daughters, you're the oldest. If the kitchen was messed up, if the bathroom was messed up, a bathroom that I didn't even use, usually it was Manny that was messing everything up, “Monèt! Why don't you clean this up? Why don't you do that?’ Once I got to be about like seven, eight years old, I had to grow up.”
Plog: Despite all of that, she didn’t take herself too seriously. Matthew, the oldest, was the mature one. Manny was the clown. Monèt was more like him. She always wanted to tag along and keep up. She says, in the family, they were the “free spirited ones.”
And they understood each other. Monèt says she and Manny were both sexually abused by family members as kids. They each found their own ways to cope. As they grew up, Monèt became the stable one. Manny was the one who needed stability. Over the years, Monèt pushed Manny to get treatment for mental illness and drug addiction. Manny even lived with her on and off.
Carter-Mixon: “He loved my kids. He was my designated babysitter. When they would have to take a time out from daycare or school, that's where they would go, with their Uncle Manny. All the births he was there. He was just like my, he was my brother, of course. But as we got older, like he just was really like my, my best friend.”
Plog: But everybody in the family worried about Manny a lot. Where he was sleeping, what he was doing. Monèt quickly figured out when it was fine for him to come around her and the kids, and when it was best for him to stay away.
Then, just a few months before Monèt got this call, Manny’s family started noticing a change. Manny had moved into a sober home where he was figuring out what he would do next. He was going to church three or four days a week. Monèt had just talked to him, two days earlier, the night before he died.
They talked on the phone for five hours.
Carter-Mixon: “We had a like really long, in-depth conversation about like religion.”
“There is a God, I know that there's a higher power. And I know that like it's, it's something, you know. But the way that I am, if something doesn't make sense, I'm going to question it and question it. I'm going to harass you and press you about it because it's like, ‘No, something's not adding up.’ Because there’s so much like bullshit associated with it.”
Plog: This is who they are. Monèt is a questioner. Manny, she says, was a diplomat. He didn’t try to change her mind. He tried to make her feel better about her doubts. And he opened up to her about finding religion again
Carter-Mixon: “He always talked about church and then like the different people at the church and their different personalities, and how he, you know, he kept saying like, ‘I really found my purpose, I'm enjoying this. Like, that's what I needed. I just needed to get back to like going to church and like being in the band because that's basically like how I get a high like, I feel like good when I do this.’”
“He would send me videos of him playing the drums. Like, ‘What did you think of that? Do you think I did good job?’”
Archival (courtesy video): (Sound of music during a church service)
Carter-Mixon: “Manny's never just sat down and said, ‘This is what I want to do with my life. I found this like, I see where my life is headed and I want to go in this direction.’ He’s never done that. I was really proud of him.”
Archival (courtesy video): (Sound of music during a church service)
Plog: Manny having that conversation and ending up dead the next day, it didn’t make sense. What happened? How did he die? But when Monèt walked into her mom’s living room that day, where her family was waiting for her, their heads were somewhere else. They were talking about burying Manny.
Carter-Mixon: “‘Why are we talking about funeral arrangements?’ In my head, I was thinking, ‘We can't put him into the dirt until we figure out what happened to him.’”
Plog: Then Monèt’s oldest brother, Matthew, sent her a news article he had seen on Facebook. He didn’t think anything of it when he first saw it, just a typical story in Tacoma. But now that they knew Manny was dead, this article read differently. It was from Tacoma’s newspaper, The News Tribune.
Carter-Mixon (reading): “‘If I can turn it because of my nails… Okay so: A man died within minutes of being arrested Tuesday for repeatedly hitting a Tacoma patrol car and struggling with officers, according to the Pierce County Sheriff's Department. The 33-year-old has not been identified.’”
Plog: This article doesn’t mention Manny’s name. But as Monèt read the details, she quickly realized the story was about him. It tells law enforcement’s version of what happened.
Carter-Mixon (reading): “So: Officials said he showed symptoms consistent with excited delirium, but a cause of death has not been determined. Excited delirium often includes attempts at violence, unexpected strength and very high body temperature.’”
Plog: “Excited delirium” is the explanation police give when someone acts bizarre, paranoid, and violent, seems to have superhuman strength, overheats, and, in some cases, suddenly dies, usually because their heart stops. But doctors disagree about whether it’s real or not.
Monèt keeps reading.
Carter-Mixon (reading): “The incident occurred about 11:20 p.m. when the man ran up to a patrol car at the intersection of 96th Street South and Ainsworth Avenue and began striking the vehicle. Officers notified dispatch they needed backup and got out of their patrol car. As officers exited their vehicle, they were immediately attacked by the man, sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said.”
“They struggled with the man for two minutes as Tacoma police officers and sheriff's deputies responded to the scene. Police managed to handcuff the man, but he allegedly… (laughs) he allegedly continued to struggle.’ How the fuck are you supposed to handcuff somebody, but they still struggle and if they are handcuffed, what? Why are you…?
Plog: The article says firefighters showed up. Manny lost consciousness. They tried reviving him for 40 minutes, but he never woke up. That’s what the story says about Manny’s death. The rest of it is about an arrest he had six months earlier.
Carter-Mixon (reading): “He was awaiting trial on a second degree robbery charge after allegedly holding up a Tacoma fast food restaurant on September 21st. In that incident, the man punched several employees and ran outside, stripped off his clothes and sprinted down the street. Deputies used a stun gun on the man because he resisted arrest and struggled, court records say.’”
“‘He allegedly told paramedics he was high on methamphetamine and marijuana and didn't remember what happened.’ That's it.”
Plog: This story from law enforcement, it has an implicit message: that Manny was a criminal with a record who used drugs. The type of person who would attack a police car for no reason and fight with officers. The type of person who would have a sudden medical episode and just stop breathing. The message is that the circumstances of Manny’s death are normal. Something tragic that just happens sometimes. But to Monèt, the Manny in that article sounded like a stranger.
Carter-Mixon: “I was in disbelief. Manny is not going to fight anybody or hit anybody. Especially if he was in his right mind. Even if he was in his wrong mind, he would still try and smooth talk his way out of something. But be aggressive towards someone that has complete, basically, control over you and your freedom? He's not going to risk that.”
Plog: Monèt was in shock. She was grieving. But there was another feeling nagging at her, that there was more to the story.
—
Mayowa Aina: Let me take you to my hometown.
When you’re driving on the interstate south from Seattle, in about 40 minutes you get to this messy set of lane changes and overpasses. There’s always construction. There’s always traffic. To the right you see a hill covered in buildings. A dome-shaped event venue rises up along the road, that’s the Tacoma Dome. Steam pours out from industrial buildings on the port. This is how a lot of people see Tacoma, Washington: from the freeway. Just passing through.
Tacoma is a second city. Just like that Oakland-San Francisco relationship, or St. Paul and Minneapolis, Tacoma has a bigger, more famous city nearby, Seattle. And gets compared to it all the time. But, we have our own flavor.
Bryant: “Tacoma just has a very specific aura. It’s just so comfortable being around people that are from Tacoma because it’s just like, I don’t know, it's just cozy.”
Askew: “I genuinely feel like it’s like being around the side of the family that you like the most. You gotta be a certain way around the other side of the family but this family is like all of your cousins (laughs).”
Scott: “It can be a little rough around the edges. If you want to find space to be you, to figure out who you are, Tacoma is a good place to start.”
Aina: A lot of outsiders don’t get it though. They might know Tacoma from the tv show ‘Cops.’ Or maybe they’ve heard it’s where serial killer Ted Bundy grew up. Whether it’s because of media coverage, a history of gang violence, a history of being working class, smaller, poorer, Blacker, people who don’t live here think it’s more dangerous than other places. They think it stinks, literally. Okay to be fair it kind of does. But it comes from the port. They call it “the Tacoma Aroma.” It kind of smells like a fart but it's really not as bad as people make it seem.
Nate Bowling: “The obvious thing is, people know about like the Tacoma Aroma and like, if it's all that, you know, then like whatever.”
White: “There was this tension like, oh, you're from Tacoma, you know, whatever Tacoma aroma or you're ghetto, you're hood.”
Danielle Bender: “Having people be like, Oh, you're from Tacoma. You know, it's like, Oh, maybe I should hate myself, you know?”
Bowling: “Even that within Tacoma is the same thing, right? So like when I would talk to folks in Tacoma, I'd say, like, ‘I'm a teacher’ and they're like, ‘Oh, where do you work?’ ‘Oh, I work at Lincoln High School.’ ‘Oh’, and we call that ‘the Lincoln “Oh”,’ right?”
“A lot of the like Tacoma is hood, Tacoma is this, is really just veiled anti-black racism, whether people want to, like, acknowledge that or not.”
Aina: In the Pacific Northwest, one of the whitest areas of the country, Tacoma is one of the Blackest cities. Growing up here, you learn to expect the jokes, the sneak-disses, and the skeptical faces. We all have our own defense mechanisms and comebacks. Even people who move here, learn pretty quickly what’s up.
Sierra Hartman: “We’ll post something like just a pretty picture of the city or something. We'll say like something positive about the city. And someone will just take an opportunity to share their negative opinions of the city.”
Aina: That’s Sierra Hartman. He and Sara Kay co-own a popular hyper local magazine celebrating the town. Someone decided to leave a review on their site. But it wasn’t a review of the mag, it was a review of Tacoma: 1 star.
Sara Kay: “It was like “great place if you’d like to get raped and murdered”
Hartman: “Yeah. Really for like the entire 20th century everyone in the world really and especially in the region just looked down on Tacoma, you know, as the gritty port city. And they always said it like as a derogatory term
Aina: When you’ve been shit on for so long, you take on a certain attitude.
Kay: “Come here or don’t. Have fun or don’t. Like, I’m not going to beg you.”
Hartman: “I just lean into like, ‘Yeah Tacoma is terrible. Like there’s nothing fun to do here. You’ll probably get murdered and car stolen.’
Kay: “Come hang or go away.”
Bowling: “The underdog, chip on your shoulder, you-will-not-disrespect-my-town-ness that the city has is something that I appreciate.”
White: “Some people make that adjustment or like say they won't say they're from Tacoma after getting so much of that pressure versus like, I feel like a lot of us end up being like standing our ground.”
Kay: “If people want to talk shit about us, we don’t care.”
White: “There's nothing else that I'd rather represent.”
Kay: “If you want to come here and experience it for yourself, that's awesome. And you can like it or leave it.”
Bender: “Tacoma vs. Everybody.”
Askew: “Period.”
Scott: “For better or worse like Tacoma will ride for Tacoma. From people saying things like ‘Oh, Tacoma, it has a smell.’ Or, ‘Tacoma is Tacompton,’ as people like to say which is both an insult to Tacoma and Compton, but...”
Aina: “A hundred percent.”
Scott: “But like if somebody says those things, they better not be somebody who's not from Tacoma.”
Aina: Almost 100,000 people follow a Facebook page where people post about crime in the city. Photos of missing cars. Thieves caught on doorbell cameras. They’re kind of making fun of Tacoma and playing up all the worst stereotypes about it. The page is called “Tacompton Files.” And this, of all places, is where Monèt ’s investigation into her brother’s death begins.
—
Plog: Just a couple days after Manny died, while everyone is still taking in the news, Monèt ’s brother, Matthew, tells her about a post online by the person who runs the Tacompton Files,
Archival (radio scanner audio on Youtube): (radio click)
A recording of police radio chatter from that night, posted to YouTube. The video’s title is “Death While in Custody.”
Archival (radio scanner audio on Youtube): “Henry 317.”
“96th and Ainsworth.”
Carter-Mixon: “At first I thought it was a video, but it was just a sound clip.”
Archival (radio scanner audio on Youtube): “Alright traffic Henry 317. 96th and Ainsworth (Unintelligible).”
Carter-Mixon: “They’re asking for assistance.”
Plog: She listens as a dispatcher and officers talk back and forth. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, or even what they’re saying.
Archival (radio scanner audio on Youtube): (Unintelligible)
Plog: But, once in a while, Monèt catches snippets of what is happening at the scene. An officer asks for “hobbles” to restrain someone’s legs.
Archival (radio scanner audio on Youtube): “Someone bring some hobbles.”
Plog: A burst of sirens.
Archival (radio scanner audio on Youtube): (Sirens)
Plog: Then, two seconds of audio.
Archival (radio scanner audio on Youtube): “Unreadable.”
Manny Ellis: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”
Plog: One more time, a little slower.
Manny Ellis: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”
Carter-Mixon: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”
Plog: It’s Manny. Someone at the scene clicked on a radio for two seconds. And in those two seconds, it captured Manny saying, “I can’t breathe.”
Carter-Mixon: “I just cried because I heard like the plea in his voice. He was scared. And he was like begging for them to like just let up so he could like catch a breath. I don't think Manny knew that he was going to die that night.”
Plog: “You said that your brother sounded like he was scared when you heard that. Have you ever heard him sound that way before?”
Carter-Mixon: “Yeah, when we were little, because my dad was really abusive. And so when he would like, beg and plead like to not get a whooping, like, that's how he would sound. Like, desperate, like, ‘Please. Don’t. Please.”
Plog: “Is that how you knew something wasn't right?”
Carter-Mixon: “Yeah. For sure.”
Plog: Manny crying out that he couldn’t breathe, That was never mentioned before. The newspaper article, the story by police, it casts Manny as an aggressor, not someone who was scared. It had been just a couple days since Monèt found out her brother died, and she already had a feeling that something was wrong.
Carter-Mixon: “It like validated what I already knew. So the first thing was how the news was delivered. The second thing was this article didn’t make any sense because it didn't speak to Manny’s character, who he really was. The third thing was is the audio. That was the final thing. That was the affirmation.”
—
Aina: This moment would change Monèt. Eventually, it would change Washington State law. And it would bring a national divide about racism and policing right here, to Tacoma. This story that nobody paid attention to, it would set up what promises to be one of the most important trials in Pacific Northwest history.
Plog: We want to know: what Manny’s life meant, and what his death means now. What happened to him can tell us something about the protest movement we all just lived through, something we’re still grappling with: What really changed? And can we actually hold anyone accountable?
On the next episode of “The Walk Home.” Monèt ’s investigation collides with the racial justice movement of 2020. And in the chaos of that moment, a new piece of information surfaces.
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