ZingSync

— Reported in Milwaukee

The body had been taken away, the police and the news cameras were gone, too, and now all that was left of Samuel Sharpe’s existence were the piles of fabric and tarp he had called his home.

A mile away, in the Fiserv Forum, thousands were gathered for the political convention where Donald Trump would officially accept the Republican presidential nomination, but here, Jeanne Heckenlively was keeping watch.

“The police is gonna try to take this down, but I won’t let them,” Jeanne, 83, said to a man who was walking by.

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Sam had lived in this back-alley encampment close to King Park on the near-west side of Milwaukee, where a dozen other tents had been recently erected on a strip of dirt and lawn. The area was littered with empty beer cans and broken umbrellas and shopping carts and an old mattress.

The previous afternoon, on Tuesday, Sam, 43, had been shot and killed by Ohio police officers who were in town to assist law enforcement in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention. A group of 13 officers had been talking on the street when they spotted two men in a standoff at the park named after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“He’s got a knife,” one officer said abruptly, referring to Sam, according to police cam footage. “Yes, he does.”

The officers shouted at Sam as they began running toward him from about 50 yards away, though it is unclear that Sam ever heard or understood their commands from that distance.

“Hey!”

“Stop!”

“Drop the knife!”

“Police!”

Then five of the officers opened fire, and Sam was dead.

Rats crawled in and out of Sam’s tent where Jeanne was still sitting on Wednesday.

Until November, Sam had lived at his mother’s home in Milwaukee. He had always been a mama’s boy, said his sister, Angelique Sharpe, and he had advanced multiple sclerosis. But Sam felt called on a mission to spread scripture to people living on the margins of society. He said it was the example Jesus had set. And so he left, Angelique said, and made the tent his home.

The rodents had taken over the encampment and were terrorizing the other residents. At night, the vermin would chew through the tents, and they would crawl without fear over people who slept without a covering. Jeanne was unfazed, or perhaps resigned, as they inched closer to her arm, still bearing a hospital bracelet after she was recently beaten by a drunk man. A gash on her arm was blue and yellow from an infection.

“You can’t sleep here,” a woman who also lived in the camp said to Jeanne. “The rats are going to be all over you again.”

Her name was Alice Tyler, 55. She had been a home health aide before her partner developed brain cancer, and her work became exceptionally difficult after his death. Now she lived here.

“You go away!” Jeanne said sharply.

“I’m just telling you,” Alice said, “that you don’t know what those rats are carrying around.”

Alice walked off.

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On the other side of a small strip of trees, Alice picked up a conversation with two men, Raheem Burks and Robert Camacho, who did not live in the camp but frequented the area to provide assistance. They had each known Sam, to the extent anyone could know anyone out here, and they were each still processing what the killing meant.

Robert, who was well known among the local homeless because he often provided water and tents to those who needed them, had known Sam to be a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Sometimes they studied the Bible together.

Alice shared now that Sam had confided that he had served time in prison; in the early 2000s, when he was a young adult, he was convicted of a felony for an armed robbery. It was during those years locked up that he found guidance and focus in the word of God.

“He was trying,” Alice said.

“Falling is not failing, failing is staying down,” Raheem said now.

“Everything became overwhelming,” Alice said.

“He was turning over a whole new life,” Robert said.

Alice could relate; she had been incarcerated as well, she said, and recalled the feeling of being abandoned by family, by friends, by society. Sam did not talk to other people about the private parts of his life, she said, except for his devout Christian faith. That was the light that guided him toward who he wanted to be, and that’s the person Alice knew.

Sam’s father, whom he was named after, instilled the profound faith in God that Sam carried, said Angelique. The elder Samuel, who is deceased, had been drafted into the Vietnam War. His example as “a veteran who fought for our country where he couldn’t even share a water fountain with his comrades,” as Angelique said, was a point of pride for the family.

Sam’s incarceration was a low point in his own life, she said, but he turned himself around.

“Who gets condemnation and who gets grace?” Angelique wondered. “Look at Trump. Look at Trump. They trying to give him grace so he can be president again. Sam was 20 when this [arrest] happened.”

Behind Alice, rats ran back and forth between the tents and the trees.

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The residents of the tent encampment walked one another through all the pressures Sam had faced in the days leading to the altercation with the other man, whose name they said was Antonio.

Rat poison had recently made Sam’s dog sick, which weighed heavily on him in the final days of his life, according to other residents of the encampment.

He was also increasingly concerned about his own safety. Sam had even called his mother and sister in distress about the man, who had threatened to kill him and his dog and to set his tent on fire. Sam had started talking to himself more than usual.

A heat wave had hit Milwaukee, bringing temperatures into the 90s, putting everyone on edge and making the rats more aggressive.

“This guy was irritating him and bothering him. He was picking and nicking, and he had to defend himself. This guy was more aggressive than he was,” Alice told Robert. “He felt like he had to defend himself. He was 115 pounds, wet. He had health issues.”

Behind the trees, Jeanne was still sitting, looking around Sam’s tent.

Jeanne recalled that he had invited her to sleep on the old leather couch in front of his tent because she did not have one of her own. He had placed it there to block the wind.

“I don’t think anybody is going to show up,” Jeanne said, although she wasn’t sure who she was waiting for.

Modern political conventions officially kick off presidential general elections in America. Really, though, they are spectacles that largely exist specifically to elicit media coverage. Journalists and political elites dutifully flock to convention cities where they sequester themselves within a heavily guarded perimeter. There they interrogate the candidate’s message, assess the mood of party leaders and debate how one party’s unity will fare against the other party’s fissures.

Outside the perimeter in Milwaukee — where the security stakes were heightened after the assassination attempt against former president Trump — everyday residents groused about disrupted bus routes, small tips on large checks and nightmarish traffic obstructions.

The tent city where Sam lived wasn’t just outside the perimeter of the convention. It was outside the perimeter of society.

That out-of-town police officers had been nearby at all was baffling to many residents of the area, who expressed disbelief after the Milwaukee Police Department defended their actions. “This is a situation where somebody’s life was in immediate danger,” Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman told reporters, adding that the officers were assigned to the area in case of protests. “These officers who are not from this area took upon themselves to act to save someone’s life today.”

Robert, who worked with homeless people around Milwaukee, recalled that there used to be many tents at MacArthur Square, just south of the Fiserv Forum.

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As the city prepared for the convention, he recounted, they had gradually pushed the homeless farther and farther outside of the convention’s perimeter. And in displacing many of the homeless, they created new tent encampments with people who did not know one another.

“The thing I can’t understand is why they had Ohio police here when this is the city of Milwaukee,” said Robert. “They should have had the outside police at the Fiserv Center and not here. The city protects the city.”

“They could have used their damn Taser thing,” Alice said.

“I understand that, but they were policing,” Raheem said, turning heads.

Raheem, 54, sometimes volunteered as a security guard at the nearby social services organization called Repairers of the Breach. He met Alice there, and they became friends. Now he stopped by to check on her from time to time.

“Okay, stop, because you said one word too many,” Alice said. “You make it look like they had a right to be out here shooting.”

“I’m not saying the whole thing, shooting the dude, was right. What I’m saying is they’re authorized to do it,” Raheem said.

“They here visiting,” Alice said of the police. “Take your a-- over there where Trump at. What you doing over here shooting people?”

Elsewhere in Milwaukee, Sam’s family was grappling with his death, too. Police had shown up at Sam’s mother’s house with a photo of him hooked up to a ventilator, asking for a positive identification.

Police said they recovered two knives from the scene. People at the tent city agreed Sam had the knives for self-defense. His family and friends were braced for the assumptions that would circulate online after a Black man was shot by police.

“We live in a country where everyone is toting around guns supposedly to protect themselves but Sam can’t carry a knife when someone is threatening his life?” fumed Angelique, Sam’s sister.

Jeanne was still sitting in front of Sam’s tent by the end of Wednesday afternoon when another family member of Sam’s walked by and introduced herself. She was looking for some answers about what led Sam to pull a knife on someone. It seemed so unlike him.

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“He was the kind of person that took care of people,” Jeanne told her, not answering her question about whether she knew what happened. “I thought it was this other guy who beat the s--- out of me; he’s the one they should have shot.”

The look on his family member’s face showed resignation; she wasn’t going to get answers here.

Downtown, a vigil was being planned for the next day by activists who wanted to call attention to the shooting, which some referred to as “the next George Floyd.”

On the corner where Sam was shot, a makeshift memorial of flowers, notes and protest signs was forming.

Here, in the alley where Sam lived, the news cameras were gone and not coming back, and all that was left of him was his tent.

Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

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