Federalist via InstapunditWhen social justice activist and lawyer Derecka Purnell was just 12 years old, she and her sister watched a police officer shoot a young boy in a city recreation center because he had ignored the basketball sign-in sheet. This jarring, emotional, and deeply unsettling story was published July 6 at The Atlantic, in the section reserved for ideas, under the bold, attention-grabbing headline, "How I Became a Police Abolitionist."
Purnell’s deeply personal story of shattered innocence and shattered bones at the end of a policeman’s gun was shared widely among top journalists and activists. "I started her article thinking abolition was impossible and ending thinking it must happen," the president of a social justice think tank at Harvard wrote on Twitter, quoting his mother. "This is a beautifully written piece," the Atlantic’s constitutional law editor agreed. "Derecka is the future," an activist journalism executive declared.
There’s a major problem with Purnell’s story, however. Based on a Federalist investigation of newspaper archives and the police department records, and questions to The Atlantic, the police union, and the office of the mayor, it does not appear to have ever happened.