Gathered Together for Richard Lua
by Grannie //Video by Angel Luna and Moses Aviles//Slide Show by Tiburon F!B!

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On February 20th, Silicon Valley DeBug, a collective of writers, artists, organizers, and workers for justice, opened their space in downtown San Jose to remember a victim felled by taser at the hands of San Jose police.

How to say goodbye? Many wrote words of farewell next to an enlargement of Richard's picture. Some spoke in words, others in song. Raul (Curly) Estremera shared a poem he wrote for the family of Oscar Grant, eerily appropriate so soon after the Grant family's loss.

The Lua family brought dinner and refreshments. Older relatives sat and sighed. Small children played hide and seek and passed around cookies while they watched a rapper entertain, too young to understand the meaning of what happened on February 11th when Richard was killed in what the family's lawyer called, "murder at the hands of the police".