On the first day of July, more than 20 people sat in a circle under an unrelenting sun outside City Hall in Utica, N.Y. City employees peeked from behind shutters and through office windows. A 19-year-old man, Thuong Oo, stood in the middle of the group, shouting into a megaphone.
The police had killed Mr. Oo’s 13-year-old brother, Nyah Mway, two days earlier and he was angry. Late on June 28, an officer shot Nyah after the boy had been seen with what turned out to be a pellet gun and was tackled to the ground.
“I went to the hospital and they said they had a shootout with my brother,” Mr. Oo told the crowd. “But I watched the video and it said different things, so it doesn’t make any sense.”
Many of those encircling Mr. Oo were members of the Karen, a refugee ethnic group from Myanmar, and almost all them were young. “Take my hand not my life!” one demonstrator’s sign said. “I still want to go to school.”
Older Karen residents stayed on the periphery. They were supportive — some carried their own signs — but they were quieter than their younger counterparts.
Refugee families make up a quarter of Utica’s 60,000 residents. About 8,000 are Karen, and the demonstrations prompted by Nyah’s killing have revealed a dynamic that is common in immigrant communities: Young people who grew up in the United States, speak English well and understand the country’s systems often become the public activists.
Still, Utica’s Karen, who plan another protest on Saturday, are united in their fury regardless of age.
Nyah, who had just graduated from middle school, liked to hang out in the neighborhood with his friends and get food, his family said. That is what he told his mother he was doing the night of June 28.
The police stopped him and a friend who was straddling a bike on a quiet, working-class street around 10 p.m., officials said. The officers were investigating robberies and suspects described as Asian males with a black firearm. One suspect had been on a bike and the other had been walking, the police said.
When one officer asked to pat the boys down to “make sure you have no weapons on you,” Nyah fled, police body-camera footage shows. An officer chased after him, and the footage, when slowed down, shows Nyah turning with an object in his hand. The officer can be heard yelling “gun!” before tackling the teenager. Nyah held onto the object while he was on the ground, the police said. Seconds later, the footage shows, a second officer arrives. A gunshot is heard, but not seen.
The police said later that the object in Nyah’s hand was a pellet gun.
When Nyah was not home by 9 p.m. as usual, his mother became worried. A little after 10 p.m., officers were knocking on her door.
At the hospital, Utica’s lone Karen police officer spoke to Nyah’s parents, but she had not been at the scene and what she said about a shootout did not fully match what they later learned about the fatal encounter, the family said.
The discrepancies have intensified distrust between city leaders and the Karen, many of whom were already wary of military and police figures. Older Karen residents lived through decades of armed conflict with the government of their native country, a onetime British colony previously known as Burma. They endured displacements at home, fled state violence into neighboring Thailand and, as refugees, resettled in the United States.
The older Karen are afraid, Kay Klo, 26, said, that “if they try to be vocal, that something bad might happen to them.” Like other members of the younger Karen generation, Ms. Klo grew up attending the same schools as Utica’s leaders and police officers. She has emerged as one of the Karen’s main representatives in demanding an explanation for Nyah’s death.
“This is our home,” she said, adding: “We’re going to work with the community to make it better. We’re not running. Our parents ran, but this is our home, too.”
Many of those pressing for answers about the killing are in their teens and early 20s. Nyah’s parents have leaned on Mr. Oo and a 19-year-old relative, Lay Htoo, to translate and represent them.
Other young people schedule vigils and demonstrations, telling people what signs to bring and which phrases to chant. Fluent in English, they speak at protests and to reporters, while many older members of the Karen community typically speak through interpreters.
“They have almost no language barriers at all,” said LuPway Doh, 42, the chairman of Utica Karen Community. “But for the older ones, like us, expressing things in our second language is kind of hard sometimes.”
Nonetheless, the older Karen have provided guidance and a calming presence.
On the last Sunday in June, Ms. Klo, the executive director of the Midtown Utica Community Center, sat in a Baptist church auditorium next to the mayor, Michael P. Galime, as residents confronted him.
One woman was upset about Mr. Galime’s remarks at a news conference the day before, when he appeared to sympathize with the police officers. She began shouting. Other young people stood to echo her frustration or yelled from their seats. Older people quickly stepped in, with several trying to soothe the woman and leading her from the middle of the room.
Later that night, at a private meeting, older Karen affirmed their support for the young people taking charge and leading the response. But they were firm on one thing: that there be no violence.
The news of Nyah’s killing has reached Karen enclaves across the country and beyond, said Myra Dahgaypaw, a board member of U.S. Campaign for Burma, a human-rights organization. She said it was the first time she could recall the police killing a Karen person in America.
“It’s sort of a really new thing that worries us,” she said. “Now it comes to our community, so what’s next?”
Nestled in New York’s Mohawk Valley region about 100 miles west of Albany, Utica lost manufacturing jobs in the 1990s, went through an economic downturn and saw its population fall. The arrival of refugees in recent decades has helped stem the decline.
While younger members of Utica’s Karen community have mostly adapted to American life, many older members have not found it as easy, Mr. Doh said. When the city holds public events, it often leaves out his community, he added.
In recent years, the Utica police and city leaders have tried to engage with the Karen, Mr. Galime said. He acknowledged that the killing of Nyah would set those efforts back.
“Any time there’s any question and it ends up through mass public interaction like this, you always have to rebuild trust,” the mayor said. He said last week that the robberies remained under investigation.
Officials identified the officer who killed Nyah as Patrick Husnay, a six-year veteran. He and two other officers were placed on administrative leave while the police and the attorney general investigate the episode, Mark Williams, the police chief, said.
Killings of civilians by the police have set off protests across the country in recent years, cases like the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and weeks earlier, the death of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her Louisville, Ky., apartment during a botched police raid.
Nyah’s death has not caused a national outcry. But in Utica, it was followed by what have become familiar rituals. There have been vigils, protests and pressure on leaders. A GoFundMe page for his family had raised about $52,000 as of Friday. A website calling for justice was launched.
Nyah’s family has hired Earl Ward and Julia Kuan, lawyer whose firm represented the family of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by the police in Cleveland in 2014.
Police officers are rarely prosecuted for using deadly force when they believe their lives are in danger. Mr. Galime has said that the attorney general’s office would determine whether the officer’s use of force was justified, He said he could not answer questions about the officers’ decisions because he was not there, but did not see anger in their actions.
At Nyah’s family’s home, his relatives have mourned. A room has been lined with pictures of him through this childhood, and friends have rallied around, bringing food and spending time.
Nyah, who was born in Thailand after his family fled there as refugees, loved playing basketball, said Mr. Oo, who taught the sport to his brother. He also liked to spend time taking care of their mother and 7-year-old sister, Paw K War. Nyah named her himself, Mr. Oo said.
Since Nyah’s killing, his 16-year-old brother, Maung Zaw Myint, has isolated himself from the family, Mr. Oo said.
“I just want justice and to be able to see my brother,” he said, adding: “I can’t wrap my head around that he’s gone.”
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