Donovan was usually loving and affectionate, LaTonya said. But this summer, the couple began having heated arguments. Donovan shoved LaTonya out of a chair at a park in August, she said, so she fled and called police.
The call set off a devastating chain of events that culminated last week, when Donovan, 20, was shot and killed by police at 2:30 a.m. in the bed the couple shared. LaTonya was at work. The shooting is the latest high-profile incident to rekindle anger over police tactics toward Black people, particularly the use of nighttime raids.
Police had arrived at Donovan’s apartment with warrants for his arrest. They were acting on misdemeanor charges of domestic violence and assault stemming from LaTonya’s call in August, along with a year-old felony charge for improper handling of a firearm in a vehicle.
For Donovan’s family, it is a time of mourning for a young man they describe as funny and caring, adored by his siblings and teachers even as he struggled with mental health issues. He loved playing basketball and football, eating oxtail stew and making music videos.
For LaTonya, there is no end to the anguish — the loss of the man she loved, the prospect of raising a baby without its father and the knowledge that her call to the police last month may have inadvertently led to Donovan’s death.
The night Donovan was killed, LaTonya was working the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift at Tropical Nut and Fruit, a food company in nearby Grove City. A neighbor called to tell her that Donovan had been shot and was unresponsive.
Now her days are a blur of tears and what-ifs. “He was a really good person,” said LaTonya, 30, who spoke exclusively with The Washington Post. “I never wanted him to get in trouble. I wanted him to figure out his life. I’ll never understand this.”
“What me and him went through, it had nothing to do with killing him out of his sleep,” LaTonya said as she wept. “You killed him because he woke up.”
In body-camera footage of the shooting released by authorities, officers knock on the apartment door multiple times and identify themselves before two men come out and are handcuffed. Then an officer handling a police dog opens the door to the room where Donovan slept. A bright light illuminates Donovan starting to sit up, and the officer immediately fires his weapon. Donovan was unarmed.
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations has launched a probe into the killing. The officer who shot Donovan was Ricky Anderson, a 30-year veteran of the force assigned to the canine unit. He was placed on administrative leave per department policy.
Mark Collins, a lawyer for Anderson, said the officer saw an object in Donovan’s hand that he believed was a gun. After Donovan was shot, body-camera footage shows a vape pen lying on the bed.
David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on criminal procedure and police conduct, said that the swift release of the body-camera footage was a first step toward accountability. Given the public attention to the case, Harris said he expects the investigation to conclude within weeks.
Rebecca Duran, Donovan’s mother, said she planned to speak more extensively about her son’s life in the coming days. “This has been a terrible time for all of us,” she said. “He was so much more than anything that has been released about him” by authorities.
Donovan was raised in a culturally diverse family of seven brothers and sisters, some of whom are Latino. Growing up in Columbus, he played basketball at a nearby mosque, and people used to ask if the gangly, 6-foot-2 youth was East African, his mother recalled.
After a teenager pulled a gun on Donovan’s younger brother, the family moved to a suburb of Columbus. Donovan started his junior year at Westerville Central High School and began playing for the football team.
In a journal he kept for an English class his senior year, he described feeling like an outcast among his suburban classmates. “Even the kids of color were confused about the comments I would make and did not know true struggle,” Donovan wrote. He felt like kids tried to “instigate stuff with me to feel cool, and sometimes it worked.”
He didn’t want to be defined by the stereotypes or expectations of others. “I want to be known as someone who is passionate about music, someone who likes sports, is smart and has a good sense of humor,” Donovan wrote. “That is who I am and will always be.”
A former teacher shared the journal with The Post with the permission of Donovan’s family. In it, he responds to a series of questions about “The Hate You Give,” the best-selling novel by Angie Thomas later made into a film. It tells the story of a police shooting: the protagonist’s best friend is killed by an officer who mistakes a hairbrush for a gun.
Two years before his life would take a similar turn, Donovan reflected on questions of police bias and brutality toward people who looked like him. Black people deserve “the same treatment as white people and the same consequences, not to be judged more harshly or unfairly,” he wrote.
Kt Cress, a teacher at Westerville who taught Donovan for two years, remembered his enormous smile and said he was unusually insightful and kind. When Cress’s toddler was hospitalized with a serious infection the summer after Donovan’s graduation from high school in 2020, he texted her messages of support, and they remained in touch.
During his senior year, Donovan spent several months in foster homes, a situation his mother described as the outcome of mental health issues and an attempt to get him additional help. In 2021, she called police after he arrived at her home in the middle of the night and punched her in the arm during an argument, according to a police affidavit.
The month before, police had stopped a car where Donovan was sitting in the passenger seat and found a loaded gun on the floor in front of him, a police complaint stated. He was charged with improper handling of a firearm in a vehicle, a felony. The accusations were never tested in court.
At the start of this year, Donovan was spending some nights at a homeless shelter, LaTonya said. The staff there helped him find his own apartment. He worked most recently at a factory making aluminum pans. When he found out that he was going to be a father, he was ecstatic.
On July 15, Lewis posted a photo on Instagram of two positive pregnancy tests and said how much he loved LaTonya. “Even though we be going through it that’s my forever queen,” he wrote. On his YouTube page, he posted a song he wrote for her.
Last month, he brought LaTonya a card, flowers and a pineapple — her favorite fruit — on her birthday. But while they were sitting at a park, the couple began to argue, and Donovan grew angry. He pushed her out of a chair and onto the ground, she said.
LaTonya ran to a nearby KFC and called police. It wasn’t the first time he had assaulted her, she told them, according to a police affidavit. LaTonya told The Post that Donovan had pushed her once before the incident in the park, causing bruising to her face. A warrant was issued for Donovan’s arrest. Nearly three weeks later, police would serve the warrant at Donovan’s apartment in the wee hours of Aug. 30.
Meanwhile, the couple reconciled, LaTonya said. She spent a few days elsewhere but soon returned to the apartment. She made Donovan one of her homemade favorites, pasta with Alfredo sauce topped with blackened chicken.
Now she regrets calling the police in the first place. The authorities are “trying to paint a bad picture, but there’s no picture to paint,” LaTonya told The Post. “They took everything from me.”
On Aug. 30, she received a call from a police officer at 2:30 a.m. He repeatedly asked her whether she was at the apartment. She said no and asked what was happening, but the officer did not provide any information. She began to panic. After hanging up, she said she called Donovan eight times. There was no answer.
Less than 10 minutes later, there was a call from a downstairs neighbor: Donovan had been shot and was in critical condition. A spokesman for the Columbus police did not immediately respond to questions about the officer’s interaction with LaTonya.
At a protest outside the Columbus police headquarters Friday evening, Duran, Donovan’s mother, trembled with grief and could not bring herself to speak. On the inside of her right wrist is a small tattoo showing how to say “I love you” in sign language, a gesture she repeated with each of her kids from before they could talk.
“She wants you to know that she isn’t against all police, but she is against racist police,” said a protester speaking on her behalf as Duran nodded vigorously. “She is against warrants in the middle of the night when people are sleeping! She wants to see real change in her son’s name.”
Daryl Lewis, Donovan’s father, talked about his kind heart and his love for his siblings. “I remember him saying like, ‘Got up this morning, I made them some eggs. I put the cinnamon and honey in it, Dad, just like you,’” Lewis recalled. “He was always looking out for other people.”
LaTonya is due to give birth in March and says she is sure her baby is a boy. She knows what she will name him: Donovan Latrell Lewis, Jr.
Walinchus reported from Columbus, Ohio.
