Officer In Rayshard Brooks Shooting From Southborough

SOUTHBOROUGH, MA — One of the Atlanta police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Rayshard Brooks in a Wendy's parking lot grew up in Southborough. Devin Brosnan, who was charged with aggravated assault among other things after the shooting, grew up in Southborough and graduated from Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough.

Brooks was a black man who fell asleep in his car in the drive-thru line of the restaurant on Friday. Police were called and Brosnan was the officer to encounter Brooks. He asked Brooks a few times to move his car out of the line. After Brooks did, Brosnan's partner, Garrett Rolfe, approached Brooks' car again and told him to take a field sobriety test.

Brooks failed the test and offered to walk home. Rolfe and Brosnan then started to handcuff him. Body cam and surveillance footage shows the three struggled until Brooks ran away from Rolfe and Brosnan, holding Brosnan's taser. Rolfe fired two shots at Brooks in the back, killing him. Brosnan stood a few feet away watching.

Rolfe was fired from the Atlanta Police Department and Atlanta police Chief Erika Shields resigned.

The shooting came as towns and cities across the country hold protests against police brutality and racism. Towns like Northborough and Southborough are in the middle of difficult conversations about race, privilege and systemic oppression.

As Brooks' story gained more media attention, two former classmates of Brosnan's came forward with a Medium essay reacting to his involvement. The article went into detail about the women's experiences as mixed-race children growing up in a predominantly white town, how they felt Southborough was "shrouded in the lie of white neutrality," and how they weren't surprised by Brosnan's actions or inaction.

Caroline and Emily Joyner, the sisters who wrote the piece, took aim at the school district and said the narratives of people of color were left out of the curriculum. "Our education in Southborough did not help our town’s 'unconscious' racism," the pair wrote.

The two go on to draw parallels to another former Southborough resident, Matt Cooligan, who was photographed in 2017 holding a tiki torch and chanting in the middle of the deadly "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Joyner sisters said they rode the school bus with both Cooligan and Brosnan.

"In towns like Southborough, insidious racism is like oxygen in the air," they wrote. "It may stand out in extreme cases — but we were raised breathing it, and for white people, surviving off of it."

The sisters said residents in Southborough and towns like it should examine their relationships with race and systems that propel oppression closer.