Killing of Aiyana Jones

Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones, a seven-year-old African American girl from Detroit's East Side, was shot in the neck and killed by Detroit Police Department Special Response Team officer Joseph Weekley in the early hours of May 16, 2010. The raid targeted Chauncey Owens, a suspect in the May 14, 2010 shooting death of Southeastern High School senior Jerean "Blake" Nobels. Police had traced Owens to 4054 Lillibridge St., a duplex where Owens's girlfriend LaKrystal Sanders lived upstairs and her mother, Aiyana's grandmother Mertilla Jones, lived downstairs. Aiyana was asleep on the couch in the downstairs living room when the raid began.

Police arrived around 12:40 a.m. and threw a flash grenade through the front window of the downstairs apartment before entering. Weekley, protected by a ballistic shield, fired the fatal shot moments after entering. He claimed Mertilla Jones had grabbed at his MP5 submachine gun, causing it to discharge and strike Aiyana. Mertilla Jones denied touching the weapon, stating she reached for her granddaughter because the flash grenade had set her on fire. She was arrested, tested for drugs and gunpowder residue, and released the same morning; at Weekley's 2014 retrial it was disclosed her fingerprints were not found on his gun. Family attorney Geoffrey Fieger alleged the fatal shot came from outside the home. An A&E television crew filming the reality series "The First 48" accompanied the raid; videographer Allison Howard was later charged with obstruction of justice and perjury for allegedly lying about footage she had captured, pleading no contest to the obstruction charge in June 2013 and receiving two years' probation and a $2,000 fine.

Following a one-year internal and federal investigation, a grand jury indicted Weekley on October 4, 2011, for involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment with a gun. His first trial, before Wayne County Circuit Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway, began in June 2013 and ended in a mistrial after a deadlocked jury. A retrial began in September 2014; testimony from relatives, including emotional outbursts by Mertilla Jones and Dominika Stanley (Aiyana's mother), disrupted proceedings. On October 3, 2014, Judge Hathaway dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charge, leaving only a reckless-discharge-of-a-firearm charge, and on October 10, 2014, that trial also ended in a mistrial with jurors split seven to five in favor of acquittal. On January 28, 2015, Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy dropped the remaining misdemeanor charge, foreclosing a third trial.

A separate civil rights lawsuit filed by the family sought $7.5 million in damages, alleging excessive force and civil rights violations by the Detroit Police Department and its Special Response Team supervisors. On April 2, 2015, Weekley returned to active duty with the Detroit Police Department in a limited, non-field capacity. The case drew national attention, prompting Rep. John Conyers to request a federal investigation from Attorney General Eric Holder, and later inspired continued public rallies, including a 2016 gathering on what would have been Aiyana's 14th birthday organized by Detroit's Black Youth Project 100 and Black Lives Matter Detroit.