'Why did I get shot?': A mother seeks accountability after a police stop erupts in gunfire

Harris, a mother of five, says she is not the type to depend on anyone for help. The shooting upended that.

Harris said in an interview that, not long before the shooting, she had started a new job managing a cafeteria at a local charter school. She said she was proud to have found a career that would sustain her and her children. 

On the day of the shooting, a friend, Sinatra Jordan, was driving a Nissan Rogue rental car that Harris had been using since her own car was damaged in an accident. 

Harris said her memory of that night remains hazy, but she remembers Jordan telling her that police lights were flashing behind them.

The next thing she says she recalls is opening her eyes at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson with a terrible headache. A nurse and one of her adult daughters stood over her bed. She put her hands to her head and felt equipment that a nurse told her was to prevent swelling. She’d been there three days. 

Harris had been shot in the head, requiring surgeries to remove the bullet and repair her left eye and ear, she said.

Harris said she remains partially paralyzed on the left side of her face. She struggles to chew food and can drink only with a straw, she said. Her left eye lacks peripheral vision and she cannot see well at night. Her short-term memory is diminished. She often gets dizzy. All this makes it difficult to cook, count, drive, work or care for her youngest two children, who are 8 and 10, she said. She has sent them to live with their paternal grandmother while she stays at a friend’s home. Harris said she rarely leaves the house.

“I’m used to being an independent woman,” Harris said. “So it takes a lot out of me to not be able to do anything.”

The shooting, she said, “handicapped me for the rest of my life.”

Harris’ lawsuit accuses Officer Michael Rhinewalt of shooting her; her lawyer, Carlos Moore, said he reached that conclusion from reading court documents. The police have not said who shot Harris. 

The police’s only public account of the shooting was provided in court by Rhinewalt’s partner. 

Testifying in a September 2022 hearing, Officer Jeffery Walker, a member of the Capitol Police’s street crimes unit, said he and Rhinewalt attempted to pull over the Rogue because it had failed to stop at a red light, according to a transcript of the hearing. Walker was driving; Rhinewalt got out and began to approach the Rogue in front of a Wingstop restaurant. The Rogue then took off, Rhinewalt got back in the car and the officers followed, Walker said.

At an entrance ramp to Interstate 55, “my partner yelled at me that we were getting shot at,” Walker said. “At that time the back window of the fleeing vehicle started shattering, and that’s when I first noticed the gunshots.” Rhinewalt, leaning out of the passenger side window, “returned fire, and I backed off of the vehicle to keep a safe distance and us from getting injured,” Walker testified.

Walker said the two cars then left the highway and returned to downtown Jackson. On a residential street, gunfire again burst from the Rogue, and both officers fired at the car, Walker said. Then, Walker testified, he saw “numerous objects coming out the passenger side window.” Walker said he did not know what the objects were. 

Investigators later searched for the items and found a homeowner who told them she saw an armed group of men walk off with them, Walker said. 

Jordan, the Rogue’s driver and Harris’ friend, has provided a different account of how the chase started, the route it took and where shots were fired. Jordan, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, recounted his experience in a letter and in phone calls from a Hinds County jail, where he has been locked up for more than a year while awaiting trial. 

Jordan said that he didn’t have a gun and that he didn’t throw anything from the car. 

He said he thought about driving to a police station after Harris was shot but was afraid of getting shot there. He said he didn’t drive to a hospital out of fear that dips and potholes in the road would worsen his friend’s injuries. “I got scared and tried to drive home,” Jordan said. 

In a June interview, Tindell, the public safety commissioner, said he wasn’t surprised that Jordan would claim he was unarmed. 

“I don’t think he can deny that he was certainly fleeing law enforcement and took them on a chase,” Tindell said. “I think his actions speak for themselves, and we’ll see what the evidence reveals.”

Police and Jordan also have sharply different accounts of how the chase ended.

Walker testified that the officers followed the Rogue to the intersection of Lamar and Adelle streets, where the car hit the curb and stopped. Jordan fled from the car, and the officers chased him. Jordan then turned toward Walker with “a long black object in his left hand” and something else in his right. “That’s when I returned fire on him fleeing,” Walker said. 

Jordan dropped what he was holding, and Walker said he stopped shooting. The objects Jordan dropped turned out to be a black cellphone and a bag of marijuana, Walker testified. The officers did not find a gun in the car, Walker said. “There was also a passenger in the vehicle that we didn’t know about that was struck by a round,” Walker said. The officers called an ambulance, he said.

Jordan was not struck by a bullet, but said that the officers beat him up, and that he does not recall what happened after; he said he woke up in jail a few days later. None of the public defenders who have represented him at different points over the last year have responded to requests for comment.

A witness, Vivica Johnson, said in an interview with NBC News in April that she was sitting with a friend on a porch at the corner of Lamar and Adelle that night when she saw Capitol Police chasing and shooting at a car. Johnson said when the driver got out with his hands up, the officers fired at him. The man fell to the ground and the officers began beating him, she said. 

“Once they got through kicking him and beating him, they went to the vehicle that he jumped out of and that’s when they realized it was a lady shot in the head,” Johnson said. 

Johnson said she heard one of the officers exclaim, “Oh my God, oh my God” after finding the woman in the car.

NBC News requested radio traffic recordings and dispatch logs from the Capitol Police and city of Jackson, but the requests were denied.

Johnson said she didn’t hear Jordan say anything until they arrested him, when she said he hollered, “Help me.”

Tindell said in June that he was not aware of the beating allegation. He said the conflicting versions of what happened would be sorted out in the criminal justice system. 

“We’ve got a subject in this case, now the accused, claiming one thing, a witness saying one thing and an officer saying something else,” Tindell said in response to NBC News’ questions based on accounts from Jordan, Walker and Johnson. The details will be “examined in a court of law,” he said. 

The collection of evidence from the chase route — surveillance video from homes, businesses and government buildings, shell casings scattered on the street, witnesses’ accounts — lasted several days. Walker testified that he and his partner did not find any guns in the Rogue and that the patrol car had not been hit by any bullets. He testified he was told the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which is looking into the shooting, found guns but he did not know where. 

The shootings and the agency’s refusal to release records fueled opposition to efforts by state officials to further expand the power of the Capitol Police, which for decades focused primarily on security for government buildings. So far, the Capitol Police have won that fight. Republican lawmakers from outside Jackson passed a law in April that expanded the agency’s jurisdiction to the entire city, which is led by Democrats. Civil rights groups are suing to block the law.

At the time of the Harris shooting, Capitol Police officers were guided by policies that had not been updated since 2006. They included a policy that prohibited car chases because they “present an unacceptable danger to the lives of the public, officers and suspects involved in the pursuit.” But the document then contradicted itself, outlining situations in which officers may conduct car chases. 

The Capitol Police’s use-of-force policy at the time prohibited using deadly force “at or from a moving vehicle.” But it also allowed for the use of deadly force if officers feel that their lives, or someone else’s, are in danger.

The Department of Public Safety has since updated its use of force policy to allow shooting at a moving vehicle in situations where it is “necessary to prevent imminent death or serious injury to the officer or another person.” A revised car chase policy, dated September 2022, clearly allows them under certain circumstances.

The two officers involved in Harris’ case did not wear body cameras and their car was not equipped with a dashboard camera, Tindell said in June. His spokesperson said Wednesday that the agency has started to issue body cameras to all Capitol Police officers. She did not indicate whether the same is being done with dash cameras.