Two Tennessee National Guard soldiers shot and killed Tyrin Johnson, 20, on a downtown Memphis sidewalk on July 5. The Shelby County medical examiner found a single gunshot wound in his back and ruled the death a homicide. More than four months later, no one has been charged, and the district attorney says he has not decided whether anyone will be.
Johnson was a Black young man in a majority-Black city, killed by troops that the governor sent to patrol it as part of a federal task force. Memphis lawmakers described him as a student and a young father. His family has been asking since July for the one thing that would settle the dispute over what happened: the footage of the shooting itself.
The first official account put the blame on Johnson. Police said he turned toward the soldiers with a weapon in his hand when shots were fired. The Guard’s own reports said he “rounded on them and pointed a tan handgun at them.” The autopsy does not fit that story easily, since a bullet that enters the back is not what a man facing his shooters would be expected to take.
Last week, District Attorney Steve Mulroy released four videos, including Memphis police body camera footage, street surveillance and a bystander’s recording. None shows the shooting. They show Johnson firing a gun into the air near AutoZone Park around 4 a.m. before he ran, as WSMV reported, and the aftermath: soldiers pointing handguns at him as he lay on the sidewalk, and a Memphis officer asking them, “Hey, you guys got a medical kit or anything?” Johnson’s family and supporters say the shots were warning shots meant to scare off a group of men.
The family’s attorney, Andre Wharton, said the missing seconds are the point. “What is absent is that he was running away, and that is critical to this investigation,” he said. Lucci Chambless, a community advocate working with the family, says other footage the family has seen shows Johnson running and the Guard’s unmarked van pulling up behind him. “They lied and said that he was turning towards them to justify murdering him,” she said. That is her account of video that has not been released, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which is handling the case, has not publicly said what it found.
WSMV reported that the two soldiers who fired were 19 and 20 years old, both younger than the 21-year minimum to join the Memphis Police Department. Bennie Cobb, a former police captain, told the station: “I do not believe that National Guard…have the understanding and background…needed to patrol urban streets.”
Johnson’s was not the only killing. The Associated Press reported that the Memphis Safe Task Force, created under President Trump’s push to send federal forces into Democratic-led cities, was involved in four fatal shootings between May and July.
The prosecutor’s job is narrow and urgent. Mulroy released the videos because, he said, doing so “will not compromise the work the TBI has done so far.” That is transparency about footage. It is not a decision. Soldiers who were not old enough to be Memphis police officers were given loaded guns and a downtown beat, and a young man is dead with a bullet in his back. A state that sent them owes his family a charging decision, the TBI’s full findings, and an answer on whether troops belong on these streets at all.
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