RowVaughn Wells and Rodney Wells Wiki, Biography
Tire Nichols, the latest in a long line of young black Americans whose deaths are linked to police, was a “beautiful soul” and a homely son with his mother’s name tattooed on his arm, family and friends said.
Described as “a mama’s boy” by his mother, RowVaughn Wells, the 29-year-old Memphis, Tenn., resident, the youngest of four children, was also a father. He leaves a four-year-old boy he loved to teach to skateboard.
“You have to put that skateboard down. Now you have a full-time job,” Nichols’ stepfather, Rodney Wells, recalled telling Nichols during a news conference this week.
“He looked at me as if to say, ‘Yeah, sure,’ because that was his passion.”
Friends at Tobey Skate Park in Memphis held a candlelight vigil for Nichols Thursday night.
The job, Wells said, was as a shift worker at FedEx for the past nine months, but home was never far from his mind, even while he was working. He came home every night, in the middle of the shift, for his lunch break, RowVaughn Wells said.
She thinks that’s what he was doing the night five Memphis cops pulled him over and killed him. “He was trying to get home to a safe place,” she told CNN on Friday.
Another of Nichols’ passions was photography, which he enjoyed from a very young age. His mother said he wanted to go to the park “almost every night” to take pictures of the sunset. Nichols called himself an “aspiring photographer” with a particular fondness for landscapes and posted many of his images on his website.
Nichols had a close circle of friends in Memphis, with whom he met most days at Starbucks. Politics weren’t up for discussion, his family said, but sports and his beloved San Francisco 49ers were.
“Does that sound like someone the police said did all these bad things?” Wells said at the press conference. “No one is perfectly fine, but he was very close.”
In the CNN interview on Friday, Wells said he would miss his son terribly.
“He just had a beautiful soul and touched a lot of people,” he said.
“I always joked that he would come into the house, come in and say, ‘Hello parents.’ I will never hear that again, I will never cook for my son again, I will never get a hug from my son again, I will never get anything from my son again. son just because some officers decided they wanted to hurt my son.
“No mother should have to go through this.”
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