Sanderia Faye

I remember the April day two years ago when Sanderia Faye posted to Facebook her account of a bizarre encounter with the Dallas Police, waking up to officers banging on the bedroom door in her townhouse. The novelist and SMU professor (and regular contributor to our summer microfiction series) opened her bedroom to see an officer with an assault rifle pointed at her. They’d kicked in the door to her home.

Turns out, they were looking for her neighbor, who they said was dealing drugs on the dark web with his girlfriend. But the entire encounter made her feel like she was the one who had done something wrong, and the officers treated her that way. In the wake of the killing of Breonna Taylor, Sanderia tells her own story of police abuse for The New Yorker here.