Pedro Villanueva, 19, died on July 3, 2016, after police officers in an unmarked vehicle shot into the car he was driving in Fullerton, California.
The Orange County District Attorney cleared the officers of criminal wrongdoing in 2018, but Villanueva's family subsequently filed a wrongful death lawsuit.
In 2020, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the officers' use of deadly force was "unreasonable."
In 2015 alone, 1,146 people died during or after interactions with law enforcement officials in the US, with the death toll at 1,093 in 2016.
The vast majority of these deaths were due to gunshot wounds, with a smaller number resulting from tasing, police vehicle strikes, or being reported as "deaths in custody," according to “The Counted,” a special report and database from The Guardian.
Photographer Diana Matar set out to memorialise these deaths and the spaces where they occurred. She focused on four states: California and Texas, which had the highest number of such incidents, and Oklahoma and New Mexico, which had some of the highest rates per capita.
However, Matar found the project overwhelming due to the scale and complexity involved. Over three years, she drove hundreds of miles across these states, visiting more than 300 locations where people had died during or following encounters with law enforcement in 2015 and 2016.
She ultimately captured 110 images, now published in the monograph “My America.” The collection features quiet, monochromatic photographs of everyday sites like parking lots, rural roads, and suburban sidewalks, offering a somber reflection on the incidents and their aftermath
Source:
https://edition.cnn.com/ Image:https://edition.cnn.com/
