Tina Knowles opened up about a brutal police encounter involving her brother that left her family living in fear for decades.
Tina Knowles detailed a harrowing moment of police violence and its lasting emotional toll on her family in her memoir Matriarch, revealing that her brother Skip was beaten by officers in 1967 after being mistakenly identified as a trespasser.
The incident unfolded when Skip, trying to get home after a date, was dropped off at the wrong house by a cab driver.
Though the home was close to his own, the woman inside didn’t recognize him and called the police. When she realized the error and contacted Tina’s mother, officers had already arrived and arrested him.
Tina, 71, wrote that her family watched helplessly as Skip was taken into custody. “Please don’t let them kill my son,” she recalled her mother pleading.
The next day, when the family picked Skip up from the police station, he was bloodied and battered.
“They could have killed him… we thought he was dead,” Tina wrote. She said the incident left her parents with “constant fear and anxiety.”
According to Tina, the trauma didn’t end there. She said the family endured years of harassment from law enforcement that left them “on guard all the time.”
The memoir Matriarch is in stores now.
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