It’s been nearly a year since 20-year-old Texas Tech student Erskin Charles Jenkins was shot and killed by a Lubbock County Sheriff’s deputy, and his family is still waiting for something resembling an explanation. What they’ve gotten instead is the full Lubbock Special: a grand jury no-bill, a “justifiable homicide” stamp, and a highlight-reel-style body cam edit released to “correct misinformation,” which definitely doesn’t sound suspicious at all.
Investigators say Jenkins threatened people with a weapon and pulled it out as officers evacuated the house. The family says he was literally “asleep” minutes before deputies arrived, according to Wolfforth PD’s own report. Somehow the Texas Rangers only investigated the final minutes, not the events inside the home that led to the 911 call in the first place—because why review the whole movie when you can just watch the last two minutes and call it good?
Meanwhile, Jenkins’ mother still hasn’t received the full, unedited footage the Attorney General told the county to release. Even his personal belongings didn’t come back from authorities; another student mailed them in a box weeks later. Nothing says “trust in the system” like the cops returning evidence via USPS… by proxy.
Civil rights advocates and the local NAACP are now pushing for an actual, comprehensive investigation—one that might explain how a young man went from “asleep and no threat” to “shot within minutes” once a different agency arrived. The Sheriff’s Office, of course, remains very committed to its policy of placing deputies on paid leave and referring questions elsewhere.
If transparency is the goal, why does it feel like everyone’s hiding behind blackout curtains?