ON A WARM Friday afternoon in February, Bianca Austin waits in her Airbnb in Gulfport, Mississippi, for a new friend to come by. “Hey, girl!” she says, jumping up from her chair as Katrina Mateen walks through the front door in a trenchcoat, her face framed by big sunglasses and a sparkly baseball hat. They hug like they’ve known each other for ages, though they only met last October, after police shot and killed Mateen’s son outside a nearby Family Dollar store. His birthday was earlier this week—he would have been 16—and she and Austin spent the prior night trying to bail out some protesters.
“You get some sleep?” asks Austin, who drove from the airport to the jail around midnight.
“I was knocked out in that car,” Mateen replies; they’d waited outside the jail till 6 a.m.
“I know you was!” says Austin.
Austin lives in Kentucky but has come to Gulfport repeatedly to help Mateen, feeling a special kinship. It wasn’t too long ago that police in Louisville shot and killed one of Austin’s nieces, Breonna Taylor. “You just see somebody in pain, and you know the pain they’re going through,” Austin says. “You just want to embrace them and try to be there.”
Across the United States, the police fatally shoot more than 1,000 people every year, representing nearly 5 percent of all homicides—a higher death toll than from mass shootings. Some of these cases make national news, but most don’t. Even less attention is paid to the families left behind: thousands of people, disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and Latino, who must navigate not only their grief, but the stress of protests and the press, not to mention agonizing questions of how to seek accountability from the officers who killed their loved ones.
“It’s a different fight when you up against a system that was supposed to serve and protect you,” Austin says. “There’s not a handbook for tragic situations like this.” Police who kill often receive therapy, paid leave, and lawyers—much of it publicly funded—but there’s usually little to no government support for families. In that absence, Austin and her close friend Jacob Blake Sr., whose son was shot by a cop in Wisconsin, travel around the country supporting surviving family members by, as Blake puts it, “making yourself available to them any way they want.”
There’s another protest tomorrow, in front of the Family Dollar store, and they meet up later in the evening to plan for it, joined by a handful of other organizers. Mateen mentions she has a call in a few days with the Justice Department about her son’s case. Blake offers to join. “We’ll be at the Airbnb, you come over,” he suggests. Mateen nods with relief. “I don’t know what I’m gonna hear,” she tells me. “They want to look out for me.”
There’s stress and sadness in the room, but at times it also feels like a family reunion. On the couch, someone laughs and playfully slaps Mateen’s shoulder after she makes a funny comment. She chuckles as someone else impersonates an activist from out of town who seems more interested in building an Instagram following than helping her and her son. Austin, her auburn braids pulled up in a bun, hovers around the kitchen table as Mateen’s 20-year-old daughter, Amera, a scrunchy around her wrist, eats a plate of chicken and mashed potatoes. There’s a colorful king cake on the counter waiting to be devoured. Austin’s fiancé rubs her shoulders.
It’s a full house, something 42-year-old Austin craved after she lost Breonna in 2020—the same week her city went into lockdown for the pandemic. She
