Recalling a Girl Who Wanted ‘a Real Dad’

Growing up poor in this blue-collar suburb of Riverside, Tyisha Shenee Miller learned to live without.

But there was one thing she desperately longed for. At the age of 14, Miller wrote a letter to a favorite cousin, the Rev. Bernell Butler, asking for it outright.

“So the thing . . . that I’m trying to say is . . . will you be my dad?” the girl wrote. She described what it was like to not have “a real dad . . . to talk to me, take me out, take me to the movies, beach, fun places, or to eat.”

“This is hard for me to say so please say yes,” Miller scribbled in closing. “Don’t make me beg. I love you, Bernell, and you just don’t know how much.”

This is the Tyisha Miller mourned by family members, a girl raised by a grandmother, then by an aunt. She was popular and carefree. She was a competitive, often fierce athlete. During neighborhood games of softball or football, boys would pick her for their team because she was as good as any of them.

The four white Riverside police officers who surrounded her car Dec. 28 saw the 19-year-old black woman as dangerous. Miller had fallen asleep in her car with a gun in her lap when she was apparently startled awake by the officer who broke the driver’s side window.

She was shot and killed by the four officers, some of whom said she reached for the gun. They also said Miller fired first, but they later recanted. As it turned out, investigators said later, the gun didn’t work.

After her death, authorities described Miller harshly. They called her a troubled, gun-wielding gangbanger who used drugs and alcohol. She was a girl with “a history of assaultive, confrontational behavior marked with threats of violence as well as acts of physical violence,” said a district attorney’s report taken from the police investigation.

But family members say Miller was no threat.

“She was not a violent person,” said a cousin, Antonette Joiner. Butler said the report demonized his cousin while saying nothing about the backgrounds of the men who shot her.

“It’s a sad day that the district attorney could stoop so low,” he told a local newspaper.

The shooting has divided the city along color lines. Black activists called for the four officers to be tried for murder. Riverside police officers, in support of their four colleagues who are being fired, are getting crew cuts and shaving their heads.

Lived With Aunt, Grandmother

Miller has become a symbol for civil rights leaders, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The two men have joined hundreds of others at some of the demonstrations staged each week since the shooting.

But on the night she died, Miller was mostly a wayward, playful teenager, out with the girls for a night of partying.

Miller started the last day of her life with household chores. She and a friend, Taneisha Holley, spent the morning cleaning during a rare visit to Miller’s mother’s house in Rubidoux.

Miller was born in San Diego, but raising the baby was too tough for her mother, who had epilepsy. After a few years the girl was turned over to her grandmother, who lived in Rubidoux.

Miller attended a Pentecostal church and lived a strict life until her grandmother died in 1994, Butler said. That year, she moved in with her aunt, Gwenda Butler.

“She was a tomboy, an athlete,” said the Rev. Butler, the family’s spokesman.

As she neared her graduation from Rubidoux High, Butler encouraged her to join the Navy or Air Force before enrolling in college.

But Miller had begun to drift toward trouble.

In January of last year, she was one of several teenagers accused of attacking an 18-year-old woman in an alleged gang fight. Miller later pleaded guilty to a charge of disturbing the peace and was put on probation for two years.

It was the only blemish on her record. Police mentioned her alleged association with the West Side Crips gang but cited no evidence.

Miller was popular with friends and was seen as a leader.

When she decided to go to the Galleria at Tyler after cleaning her mother’s house about 3 p.m. Dec. 28, Miller had no trouble finding girlfriends to ride with her.

As Miller drove her aunt’s white Nissan Sentra, the first sign of trouble slid from under the passenger seat.

A chrome steel handgun with a black grip came to rest near the feet of her passenger, Felicia Warner. Miller had gotten a Lorcin .380 handgun and an unloaded Remington 870 20-gauge shotgun from a friend who asked her to hold the weapons while he was on parole, police reports said.

Miller flaunted the guns on at least two occasions, according to the reports, once allegedly patting her waist and telling an amusement park co-worker at Castle Park, “I have my own protection.”

Miller told Warner that night not to worry about the guns. “Those are mine,” she reportedly said. “Kick them back under the seat.”

But Warner was very worried, and said so. “Tyisha drove to her mother’s house and apparently pretended to take the guns into the garage” before proceeding to the mall, police reports said.

Around 3:30 p.m., some of the girls drank brandy in the mall’s parking lot, police said. Then they drove around to local teenage hangouts--an amusement park, a Taco Bell and a skating rink.

Later, about 9 p.m., Miller started to drop off the first group of friends and prepared to pick up others. About midnight, she was with Taneisha Holley, on her way to pick up more friends who wanted to go to Los Angeles.

The good times ended when Miller turned onto Jurupa Avenue and noticed her front tire had gone flat.

She stopped at a 7-Eleven to put on a spare tire, and ran into a Good Samaritan named Michael Horan. He started to change the tire, but the spare was also flat. Miller agreed to follow Horan to a gas station to get air.

They wound up at the Unocal 76 station on Central Avenue.

The tire wouldn’t inflate. Horan said he had to leave, but he would give the girls a ride to a friend’s house.

As Horan and Holley prepared to leave, a man stopped to talk to Miller. Holley told him to get lost, police reports said. Miller then decided to stay with her aunt’s car, fearing someone might try to steal it.

When Holley arrived at the friend’s house, she called Miller’s aunt, Gwenda Butler, and explained what happened. Butler gave her Auto Club card to Antonette Joiner, another niece, who drove with a friend, Cheilean King, to the gas station.

The two 18-year-olds found Miller asleep in the Nissan, which was idling, with music blasting and the heat turned up.

Under the Influence

An autopsy showed Miller had a blood alcohol level of 0.13%, about 1 1/2 times the legal limit for driving. The two teenagers shouted but could not wake up Miller, who was lying back with the driver’s seat reclined.

Miller also looked strange, both girls said later. Her eyes were rolling back in her head and she was twitching. One was concerned about her health, the other was not, according to police reports.

They noticed the Lorcin handgun on her lap. The Unocal mini-mart clerk, Euri Covarrubias, also saw the gun when he came out to help.

Staring into the car, the three people made an observation that police apparently overlooked when they arrived later, according to the district attorney’s report: “Mr. Covarrubias, Ms. Joiner and Ms. King all expressed their concern that if Ms. Miller were startled, she might shoot them.”

Joiner called 911.

Police say the four officers went to the gas station after the dispatcher told them a woman was unresponsive in her car, with a handgun in her lap.

The officers spent several minutes knocking on the car window. They yelled and shook the car but failed to wake Miller, police reports said. Worried that she might be sick, they hatched a plan to smash the driver’s side window with a baton and seize the gun.

Joiner said police brushed her aside when she tried to talk to them. She wanted to tell them her aunt was bringing a key.

When police shattered the car window, Miller bolted upright in her seat. The officers said they saw Miller reach for her gun, prompting them to fire 24 shots.

Miller was hit by 12 bullets and killed instantly.

A family member who watched the shooting in horror said she saw several officers exchange high-fives after Miller was dead. Another witness said officers made racially offensive statements when family members gathered to cry.

The comments prompted federal authorities to investigate allegations of racism in the Riverside Police Department, which is largely white.

Minutes after the shooting, Miller’s aunt arrived with the car key.

After Miller’s death, a hastily scrawled note was left at the curb where she died by a girl who said she initially disliked Miller in high school. They had had an argument, but later they became friends.

“You never did me wrong,” the unsigned note said.