Jamar Clark case: How I will proceed, with my every-mother's broken heart

On Wednesday night, I steeled myself, sat at the computer screen and watched the video clips from the night Jamar Clark was shot in the head, released by the Hennepin County attorney earlier in the day.

For the last four months, I've had a picture in my head of what must have happened. It was reported that Clark had just beaten up his girlfriend and that he was interfering with the paramedics taking her to the hospital, prompting a call for the police to come. A few days earlier he had poured lighter fluid on her lawn and building and tried to set it on fire. So, yeah, it wasn't hard to conjure a "scene" in my mind of him doing something so threatening that a cop shot him.

But then, sitting in the darkness, I watched those video clips, recorded from the back ambulance camera, waiting to see this jerk of a guy provoking the situation. Waiting tensely to see the seething violence from him that my previous information prepared me to see.

But I didn't see it. In the first minute-long video, he's not even present in the tape of the paramedics loading his girlfriend into the ambulance. Then I moved on to the five minutes of Clark standing at the ambulance's closed back door. There's no audio, but he's not banging on the ambulance. He's just standing there; perhaps he's saying bad things through the closed back door, but his body motions don't look like they are impeding the ambulance or putting anyone at physical risk.

And then the squad car pulls up. In less than 25 seconds from when the officers walk to the ambulance, Clark is grabbed around the neck and thrown to the ground because he would not take his hands out of his pockets so that he could be handcuffed. The minutes of escalation and the shooting are not actually caught on tape but it was less than two minutes from when the police officers stepped into the scene, to the moment when officer Dustin Schwarze shot Clark in the head, at the urging of his partner officer Mark Ringgenberg.

Ringgenberg believed Jamar Clark was trying to get his holstered gun as they struggled on the ground. Clark's DNA was found on the grip of Ringgenberg's gun, chemical-irritant container and holster.

Less than two minutes.

Less than two minutes.

Two black young men doing something stupid. And because they did something stupid, and they are black young men in America, they are dead.

And my mother's heart breaks.

I didn't expect to see Jamar Clark as my son who did something stupid. I've read enough about him to know that, at 24, he was messed up and had led a troubled life. And, I know that there's so much underneath for what's caused that back story and partly, he's dead because of it. But he shouldn't be, and I grieve for him.

I wish I had some sage motherly insight about what's wrong with us, with black young men, with our country, with the cops. And some tidy admonition about what we have to do to fix this.

And as a white, middle-class mother, with my every-mother's broken heart, I'm going to step up and do things that I think will start making America less of a perilous and tragic place for black young men, even when they do something stupid. And I am going to count on others to do the same — to start making things more right.