A 20-year-old Memphis man was shot in the back by a Tennessee National Guard member deployed on domestic soil — and video shows the troops pointing their sidearms at him as he lay dying on the sidewalk, asking for a medical kit that nobody seemed to have. The footage, released Monday by Shelby County prosecutors, exposes what happens when you put soldiers on American streets to do police work.
Tyrin Johnson died from a single gunshot wound on July 5 after a confrontation with Guard members operating as part of a federal task force. That task force was created by President Trump and greenlit by Tennessee's Republican Gov. Bill Lee to patrol what they called crime-overrun Democrat-run cities. Between May and July, that task force was involved in four fatal shootings. Four dead at the hands of troops on U.S. soil.
Here's where the official story falls apart. The Guard's own report, obtained by the Associated Press, claims Johnson "rounded on them and pointed a tan handgun at them" — justifying both Guard members opening fire with their M17 service pistols. But an autopsy shared by Johnson's family says he was shot in the back. Shot in the back. That's not someone charging at you. That's someone running away.
The released footage doesn't show the actual shooting or the moments right before it — the most critical evidence is simply missing. What the body camera does capture is the aftermath: Guard members shouting "Hands!" and "Turn over!" with guns drawn on a man bleeding out on the pavement. A Memphis police officer arrives and has to ask the troops, "Hey, you guys got a medical kit or anything?" Soldiers trained for combat, not crisis medical response, patrolling American neighborhoods at 4 a.m.
Street camera footage does show a person in dark clothing — apparently Johnson — firing shots at three people walking on a sidewalk before fleeing. He was armed. He was dangerous. That's not in dispute. But being armed and being shot in the back while fleeing are two different things, and the Constitution doesn't grant the state a license to execute a fleeing suspect without consequence.
District Attorney Steve Mulroy says he hasn't decided whether to file charges. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is still looking into it. The Guard won't comment. The attorney for the two Guard members has nothing to say. Johnson's family attorney, André C. Wharton, is right: the question is whether that fatal shot was reasonable — and an autopsy showing a bullet in the back makes that question urgent.
NBC News and The Guardian both covered the release of this footage, and both noted the autopsy contradiction and the task force's body count. But the broader silence is deafening. The same institutional press that spent 2020 broadcasting every excess of local police has gone quiet now that it's federal troops pulling triggers on American civilians. When the state militarizes the streets, the loudest police-reform voices seem to develop laryngitis.
Johnson was a father. His grandfather says he was preparing to help run the family construction business. None of that erases the fact that he was firing a weapon on a public street. But a republic that sends soldiers to patrol its own cities — and then can't explain why one of them shot a man in the back — has a problem no amount of task-force branding can fix.
