Weeks later, before the final class, the instructor pulled Leisure aside. He told her he was a police officer.
She was shocked, since he’d never told anyone in class, but she thanked him for steering the earlier conversation to a quick and constructive conclusion.
“I thanked him for being one of the good ones,” she said.
A year or two later, Leisure said, she was driving on Interstate 75 through Evendale at night when a police cruiser pulled up behind her, lights blazing.
She was speeding, she said, no doubt about that. But the fear that rushed over her had nothing to do with a potential ticket.
Leisure knew Stephen Roach, the police officer who had shot her son, was now working in Evendale. He’d been acquitted of negligent homicide charges in late 2001 and had left Cincinnati Police for a new job there.
Evendale didn't have a big police department. What if, she thought, the officer sitting in the car behind her was Roach?
She gripped the steering wheel and looked in the rearview mirror, trying to get a better look. She started to shake, then to cry. She looked again in the mirror but could only see a figure behind the windshield.
She said the officer appeared to be checking the monitor in the cruiser, probably running her license, and then looking up again and again at her car.
Leisure kept her hands on the steering wheel, tears running down her face.
The officer never got out of the car. The cruiser just pulled away, merging back onto the highway, leaving her there on the side of the road, trembling.
She never learned if the officer was Roach, or just another officer who recognized her name and didn’t want to deal with a traffic stop involving Timothy Thomas’s mother.
But she did learn she’d had enough. She needed to get out of Cincinnati.
“I was so tired of being afraid,” she said. “I was so tired of hurting.”
Another death in another city
Leisure moved to Chicago in 2003. She had family there, but mostly she needed to be in a place where no one other than relatives knew her or Timothy’s name.
From afar, she watched Cincinnati move forward with police reforms. She kept in touch with family here and with her lawyer. And she felt, finally, that both she and the city she’d left were making progress.
Then, last summer, she watched the video of a police officer in Minneapolis press his knee on the neck of George Floyd until he died.
By 2020, Leisure said, her views of police had shifted, at least a little. She no longer viewed them all the same, as nameless, faceless brutes who abused their power. She’d met and spoke to officers and had come to believe many were doing the job for the right reasons.
But that video, it brought it all back. “I felt a lot of anger,” she said. “I still do.”
She wasn’t surprised when Cincinnati, like cities across the country, erupted in protests and unrest. As in her son’s case, George Floyd, quickly became a symbol, a rallying cry. His face, like Timothy’s, appeared on signs and shirts and memorials.
Unlike Timothy’s death, though, Floyd’s was captured on video and circulated on social media. Leisure immediately thought about his family. She knew what it was like for her family in 2001, but what about now? What’s it like when the entire world knows your dead son’s name?
“I can only imagine how that family felt,” Leisure said. “It hurts your soul.”
Remembering and reclaiming a lost son
At the end of every July, the weekend after Timothy’s birthday, Leisure and her extended family gather in Chicago for a party.
They call it “Tim’s Day,” a celebration of his life.
Relatives come from all over the country. It’s a family reunion, really, but the star of the show is Timothy. Leisure’s other children are there, and so is Tywon, her grandson.
She tries to avoid lectures about policing, or warnings about driving. Instead, she and her family tell stories about her son. They talk about his light-up-a-room smile, about his sense of humor, about what he might be doing today if he was still with them.
“So bright was his future,” Leisure said. “I think about that a lot.”
It’s a great day, she said, because everyone her son loved most is there, laughing, sharing stories. When they say his name, he’s not a symbol. He’s a son, a brother, a father. He’s just Timothy Thomas.
And for the day, at least, he belongs only to them.
