Manuel Ellis died in Tacoma Police custody. Now his sister is fighting for change
When Monet Carter-Mixon found herself needing to advocate for a child with special needs, she hit the books.
Soon, the 29-year-old mother of five had a degree in early childhood education.
It’s an example of how Carter-Mixon tends to approach the challenges and obstacles of life head on, she said recently.
It’s also one of the ways she’s coped with the death of her older sibling, Manny.
On March 3, Carter-Mixon’s brother — 33-year-old Manuel Ellis — died in the street while being restrained by Tacoma police. Like George Floyd, who would die at the hands of Minneapolis police months later, Ellis cried out, “I can’t breathe,” before he died.
Eventually ruled a homicide by the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office, Ellis’ death has inspired community outrage, calls for overdue police reform and, finally, an independent investigation by the state Attorney General’s Office.
Earlier this month, it also inspired Carter-Mixon and a group of attorneys, educators and social justice advocates to announce the Manuel Ellis Washington Anti-Discrimination Act, or I-1300, an initiative to the state Legislature which the group hopes will be taken up by lawmakers next session in Olympia.
According to Carter-Mixon, the initiative — which needs 300,000 signatures by Dec. 31 to be considered by the Legislature — would address many of the systemic, discriminatory roadblocks her brother faced during his life, including banning police chokeholds and neck restraints.
For Carter-Mixon, a young mother who has become the public face of her family’s grief, the initiative drive also appears to mark the start of something bigger.
Manny Ellis’ death has shone a necessary spotlight on the justice system’s failures, and particularly its historic mistreatment of the Black community.
At the same time, it has helped to turn Carter-Mixon into a loud local force for change.
As she has throughout her life, Carter-Mixon said, she has thrown herself fully into the initiative effort, even though the world of policy and legislation is new territory for her.
She knew from experience that if you want to see change, you have to roll up your sleeves and learn on the job, she said.
“I tried to figure out how to navigate the public education system with a special need child, and tried to learn what I could do to better support my child. And I accomplished that,” Carter-Mixon recalled during a phone conversation. “Now I’m starting to see a real issue with police brutality ... so I’m trying to learn how legislation works, how building things works and how politics work, because it’s important to me.”
Already a prominent fixture at local protests and family press conferences, along with her oldest brother Matthew and mother Marcia, Carter-Mixon’s involvement with the I-1300 began when the initiative’s drafters reached out through the Ellis family’s attorney, according to Jesse Winberry, a former state representative who co-authored the act.
Carter-Mixon quickly provided a dose of youth, energy and urgency to the effort, Wineberry said.
Not only did she lend support, but she helped to clarify, strengthen and refine the initiative’s language related to police chokeholds, he explained.
Carter-Mixon is now one of the initiative’s sponsors.
“Monet has been a force of nature,” Wineberry said. “She has just been phenomenal.”
For Wineberry, initiatives are nothing new. The local African American attorney was involved with the financially challenging and narrowly defeated I-1000/Referendum 88 campaign in 2019, which would have repealed the state’s longstanding ban on affirmative action in public employment, education and contracting.
Wineberry and Lynn French, who was also involved with crafting I-1300, said work began on the new initiative shortly after Referendum 88’s demise.
With this initiative, I-1300’s authors wanted to go beyond specific elements of diversity, equity and inclusion and address “all the vestiges of discrimination,” Wineberry told The News Tribune.
Along with banning police chokeholds and adding protections for Washington residents related to the discriminatory use of deadly force, I-1300 also works to address racial disparities in COVID-19 testing, treatment and — eventually — the distribution of vaccines, Wineberry said.
The broad initiative also would curtail discrimination in the publication of state unemployment data, he added.
While work on the initiative began before the death of Floyd and Ellis, Wineberry said, the recent killing of Black Americans by police and the social justices movements that have emerged in response have all been an influence during the process.
So have the profound racial health disparities that have been created by the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“You look at legislation through the lens of your experiences. I-1000 was written through a 2019 lens. And I-1300 was certainly written through a 2020 lens,” Wineberry said.
“We drafted (I-1300) to cure the ills that we observed in 2020.”
Carter-Mixon sees the initiative as a first, necessary step for people of color, indigenous communities and other minority populations that face discrimination in Washington.
The experience of losing her brother to police violence has driven her to make sure other families aren’t forced to endure the same pain, she said, or face the same discriminatory systems that her brother — and so many others — had to contend with before his death.
Carter-Mixon said she is now contemplating law school and hopes that whatever happens with I-1300, it will be just the start.
Wineberry, for one, wouldn’t put it past her.
“I think that her leadership is going to make an extraordinary difference,” Wineberry said. “In her words, she knows she can’t bring her brother back, but she can put into law policies that protect and prevent the same kinds of things from happening to other people.”
“They may have killed Manuel Ellis,” he added, “but they have given life to a new leader.”
This story was originally published November 28, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
