On Wednesday night, Diamond Reynolds watched police kill her fiancé, Philando Castile, in front of her and her 4-year-old daughter. But her ordeal — which began with a traffic stop in suburban Minnesota — wasn’t over. Police held her until 5 am at the precinct near the scene of the shooting, separating her from her daughter, she said at a press conference Thursday.
“They didn’t feed us, they didn’t give us water,” Reynolds said in an emotional statement outside the Minnesota governor’s mansion. “They took everything from me. They put me in a room and separated me from my child. They treated me like a prisoner. They treated me like I did this to me, and I didn’t. They did this to us.”
No one came to comfort her, she said, even though she had done nothing wrong and had just seen her fiancé killed in front of her.
Reynolds said the car’s taillight wasn’t even broken, which was the excuse for the stop in the first place. Castile told the officer he was licensed to carry a gun, reached for his identification, and was shot.
“They took his life for no reason,” Reynolds said, saying that Castile, who worked for the St. Paul school district, helped raise her daughter like his own. “They did this to my daughter, they did it to me, and I want justice and I want peace.”
“He didn’t do anything,” she said, sobbing. “He did exactly what the police asked. … My daughter will forever be scarred for what the police in Falcon Heights did to us for no apparent reason.”
