Honestie Hodges, a Michigan girl who was handcuffed at gunpoint by police when she was only 11 years old, has died after a two-week battle with coronavirus.
Hodges, 14, tested positive for the virusa earlier this month and her family says her condition rapidly deteriorated in recent days, MSN reports.
“It is with an extremely heavy heart that I have to tell all of you that my beautiful, sassy, smart loving Granddaughter has gone home to be with Jesus,” Alisa Niemeyer, the child’s grandmother, said in a post on the GoFundMe website.
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Honestie made national headlines in 2017 when cops investigating an attempted murder at her home confronted the child outside, pointed weapons, handcuffed her and confined her inside a police car.
Check out the news report about the incident via the YouTube clip below.
EURweb previously reported, Hodges told WOOD-TV she exited the back door of her home to go to the store on Dec. 6 when officers confronted her. Her mother, Whitney Hodges, said she saw police order Honestie to raise her hands and walk backward. The cops then handcuffed the girl, patted her down and put her in the back of a police car, Hodges said.
“It made me feel scared and it made me feel like I did something wrong,” Honestie told the TV station.
“The whole time they are telling her to come down, I’m telling them, ‘She’s 11 years old. That’s my daughter. Don’t cuff her,’” Hodges said of the officers.
Honestie said she sat in the back of the cop car banging on the windows and screaming to her mother, “Please don’t let them take me.”
Grand Rapids police were at the Hodges home searching for the child’s aunt, Carrie Manning, 40, who is white. Manning, who was later arrested, was being sought in a domestic stabbing a few blocks away, and police said they suspected she was armed with a knife.
Honestie wondered at the time if her race played a role in the officers’ controversial decision.
“I have a question for the Grand Rapids police: If this happened to a white child, if her mother was screaming, ‘She’s 11,’ would you have handcuffed her and put her in the back of a police car?” she said in a news conference days after the incident.
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