A year ago on the afternoon of June 18th, 2024, John Zook Jr. was taken from his beloved family, fiancee, neighbors, and Wayne community members by the Wayne killer cop who murdered him – Jared Grembowski.
John Zook Jr. was known by many affectionate names; many of us had gotten to know him as Uncle Johnny. Johnny called 911 asking for help, recognizing he was experiencing a mental health emergency, and they responded by sending 2 police officers who stormed into his apartment, tazed, and shot at him 6 times within 2 minutes of entering. His child, Baby John, was 4 years old at the time and sleeping in the same room.
His family, his fiancee, his mother, father, stepmother, niece, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors at Newberry Square gathered the next day to mourn him and created a space for family and community to share their love for Johnny and details around the traumatic experience of witnessing Wayne police murder him. His niece spoke volumes about Johnny’s character and spoke clearly about the true nature and function of the police to protect property and capitalism over people, and specifically to control and murder poor Black people.
Days after, the family mobilized the community, drawing a crowd of people from Wayne, Inkster, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Lansing, outside of the Wayne Police Department to protest the police’s presence in Black communities and its attack on a beloved member of their family. Many shared this grief and attestation to wanting to prevent this from happening again.
During the weeks to follow, we canvassed the apartments at Newberry Square and the surrounding shops and sites where Johnny would frequently visit, and time and time again we heard from people who recognized his face, his name, his kindness and camaraderie, and who shared their sympathy and grief having heard what Wayne allowed their cops to do to him and was putting his family through.
During this period of mobilizing for Johnny, connecting with his community, and protesting with his family and neighbors against Wayne PD and Wayne City Council, we also saw the news of the murders of Sonya Massey by Ohio killer cop Sean Grayson, and of Sherman Lee Butler, by a Detroit court-contracted killer bailiff.
The connections were clear: three Black people were killed in their own homes by police, in circumstances where they needed help or called for help and were sent cops instead. Sherman was killed by the bailiff even after a ‘crisis intervention’ team was called. Sonya was killed by the cop who was dispatched to check for danger in response to her call for help.
These crisis intervention teams, mental health units, and bailiffs are armed cops who function purely to support police arrests and to blur jurisdiction, protecting police departments from rules around transparency.
As we’ve seen most recently with ICE raids, cops with “mental health patches” escalate the situations they’re dispatched to, assist ICE with abductions, and assist police with crowd control, calling it “safety.” These types of “specialized” cop units are an excuse for each city to increase funding for police departments.
We don’t need more cops, we don’t need more types of cops, we don’t need more body cams. We need community defense.
Johnny didn’t want to be defenseless to the whims of violent police and repeated harassment, and community members across Michigan have shown that they are motivated to protest murderous police and police presence, even organizing to preemptively fend off ICE and police presence through community patrols and self defense.
Similar issues persist in Newberry Square apartments that Johnny, his fiancee, and their child were subject to. Jared Grembowski is still AT LARGE in Wayne, recently being rewarded “officer of the year” by the Police Officer Association of Michigan for murder. Wayne police have harassed people struggling with addiction near the apartment as an excuse to regularly monitor and harass the poor and working class tenants of the building. The landlords, who live in Texas, constantly threaten people with eviction from Newberry Square, an apartment where the heat regularly breaks in Michigan winters, the air doesn’t work in sweltering summers, and complaints of bug infestations go ignored.
They have threatened Johnny’s fiancee with eviction as well, demanding she make good on rent for the apartment Johnny was murdered in.
These landlords have created the very housing conditions that go hand in hand with the intrusion and violation of tenants by the police; they created the very conditions for the police to feel within their right to go into Johnny’s apartment building and kill him.
Johnny exuded love for his son, who turns six years old this September, and alongside his partner was known for being explicitly proud of his child being autistic. Our deepest condolences are with Johnny’s fiancee, son, his parents, his entire family, and his community in Wayne who keep him close in their heart.
Johnny’s beautiful fiancee and child want to commemorate his life as a generous, empathetic man who also struggled in earlier periods of his life with homelessness. We’re going to work together to honor his life and his struggle alongside members of the community who are fighting for self determination, to deoccupy housing, and against slumlords.
Tonight, July 25th, in Lansing, we are hosting a benefit show to support his fiancee and child in transition from their housing situation, which has been threatened by the predatory landlords at Newberry Square.
We ask that the wider southeastern Michigan community support this effort; the money raised will go directly to Johnny’s fiancee and child.