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Rolling Stone Magazine: "[Nicolas'] shooting seemed to sit at the nexus of problems with policing that cities across the country have been grappling with for the past year: allegations of excessive force, the vulnerability of marginalized communities to police abuse, and a paucity of mental health services, which leads to yet more violent encounters with officers...
While 30 percent of Americans felt compelled to seek therapy during the pandemic, Immokalee residents were left with few options but to cope as Morales did — head down, trudging forward to provide for their families...
“We know that if they would’ve had an appropriate response to someone in a mental health crisis,” says another senior CIW staffer and farmworker leader, Nely Rodriguez, “there wouldn’t be a young boy who’s now an orphan.”
Last Friday, Rolling Stone Magazine, one of the country's most celebrated culture and politics monthly magazines for the past 50+ years, published a feature-length article about the life – and the tragic death – of Nicolas Morales, the Immokalee farmworker
and single father who was shot and killed last September by the Collier County Sheriff's Office. The article, titled "Florida Farmworkers, Rocked by Covid and a Fatal Police Shooting, Are Demanding Justice", is a solemn, heart-breaking, and detailed account of the night Nicolas died, the ripple effects his death have had within his family and his community, and the ongoing calls for justice from Immokalee.
"… Seven months after the shooting,Jesse Andrade, Morales’ step-son, sits on a dock on Lake Trafford in a particularly rural part of Immokalee and remembers the day the dash-cam footage was published. Andrade had been at work and hadn’t looked at his phone for several hours. At the end of his shift, he found it inundated with text messages and phone calls asking if he’d seen the video yet.
Andrade, who lives in Immokalee and has a family of his own, grew up with Morales alongside three of his siblings. 'It takes a real man to raise another person’s children,' he says in a low voice, his eyes concealed by dark sunglasses. When he watched the video of his step-father’s death, he immediately broke down at the thought of Nicolas Jr., he says, and what his life might become without both of his parents. 'The first thing that came to my mind was my little brother because now he’s basically on his own.'…"
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