CINCINNATI — Terina DuBose Allen had just gotten out of the shower when she answered the phone. It was her brother Aubrey DuBose.  Aubrey warned Terina, “You need to sit down.”  “I’m not sitting down,” Terina responded, sensing something wrong, and worrying maybe something had happened to their mother.  Aubrey said, “Sam is dead.”  Terina recalled to me over lunch Thursday in downtown Cincinnati, “I just screamed,” and she said she dropped to the floor. “Everything in my body went numb.” She continued, “I couldn’t get off the floor for three hours.”  Samuel DuBose was her brother, the second of five siblings. Terina is the oldest. Sam — no one called him Samuel, Terina explained — was a 43-year-old, unarmed Cincinnati man shot in the head and killed on July 19 by a University of Cincinnati police officer, Ray Tensing.  Terina struggled to explain the enormity of her and her family’s loss and her reaction to it: “I broke down because we had just lost a really good person, a person in the universe who always had your back.”  I spent much of the day Thursday with the DuBose family, “embedded,” as their lawyers called it. I went with them as they made the media rounds; I sat with them in the courtroom during the arraignment as they saw the man who killed Sam in the flesh for the first time; I ate with them; I was there when they laughed and when they cried uncontrollably in a hotel hallway. Grief comes in waves that keep crashing to shore.  I have had the honor and the solemn duty to be around many families with similar losses in the last couple of years, and there is something of an unsettling sameness: The feeling of being thrust into a harsh spotlight when you’d rather quietly grieve; being motivated by a sense of mission to fight for the person who is lost, all the while emotionally and physically running on empty; resisting the pull of a world trying desperately to reduce the man or woman you loved into a martyr it can champion or, conversely, a menace it can despise.  Tensing’s lawyer, Stew Mathews, said of Tensing: “He’s devastated by this, as is his family, and he is currently lodged in the Hamilton County Justice Center.”  Actually, if you want to see devastation, look no further than the DuBose family. As Terina said at the courthouse, “I wish my brother was in jail and not dead.”  But in addition to the staggering sense of loss is also a steel-spined determination, and no one in that family typifies that more than Terina. She has emerged as something of a spokeswoman and a warrior.  As she spoke to one of the lawyers on the sidewalk, I heard a man say over my shoulder, “She’s strong as hell,” to which a woman responded, “She’s my new idol.”  For instance, she has become a strong advocate for body cameras, although they are not perfect solutions. As she put it, in her brother’s case, they didn’t prevent the crime, but they prevented the cover-up.  Terina’s sister, Cleshawn DuBose, said of her: “We call her ‘Get-Right-Terina.’”  I got the sense of that statement immediately: If you were in the wrong, Terina would get you right.  Terina, who said she holds a graduate degree in strategic leadership and owns her own corporate consulting company, wanted to correct some of the “lies” about her brother.  According to both sisters, Sam wasn’t violent, and he wasn’t a heavy drinker. But, Terina said, “he wasn’t a monk” either.  As Terina said, “I’m trying to give you the real.” Cleshawn chimed in, “We don’t want Sam to be misrepresented.” Terina added, “for the better or the worse.”  Terina summed it up: Sam had been arrested dozens of times on traffic violations. Also, he smoked marijuana, and had years ago served time for selling it.  But as Terina put it, “That was the worst of it.”  Not only are none of those reasons to kill a man, or to say that he “deserved it,” none of those reasons have anything whatsoever to do with the incident that led to Sam’s death.  Sam was a human being — a man, a son, a brother and a father. “Sam was loved and Sam loved, hard,” Terina said.  Midway through the day, Sam’s mother, Audrey DuBose, joined the rest of the family on their rounds.  She was visibly drained, but still spiritually moored. She insisted that Terina and Cleshawn pray with her during one of our car rides: “We need to pray; we need the strength.”  I noticed the way she drew long breaths, the way the water in the bottle she was holding vibrated because her hand was trembling, the way she closed her eyes for long stretches, even when talking. It was the familiar fatigue that hangs on the mothers of killed children.  She confessed to me in a quiet moment: “All I want to do is just shut my door and cover up and never open it again.”  That is what devastation feels like.  Charles M. Blow’s usual column will not appear on Monday.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 31, 2015, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: DuBoses: Grieving, but Determined. Today's Paper|Subscribe
The siblings and mother of Samuel DuBose are struggling to deal with his killing by a university police officer.