Nyah Mway:
The boy who will forever be 13

Utica police shooting of teenaged Karen refugee brings new trauma to community haunted by war.

Oct. 17, 2024

By Abby Seiff for RFA Investigative and Soe San Aung for RFA Burmese

Photographs by Gemunu Amarasinghe

Read RFA coverage of this story in Burmese"

Rewind nine years from June 28, 2024.

Before Nyah Mway is shot and killed by the police. Before protesters chant his name. Before his kid sister makes their mother cry by asking, night after night, when Nyah’s coming home.

It’s 2015, he’s 5 years old and the family has just arrived in Utica, New York— Nyah, his two big brothers, his mother and father. They’ve left behind the refugee camp in Thailand where all their relatives live, and the border where his father lost his leg after stepping on a landmine, and Myanmar where an endless civil war has wreaked havoc for generations.

They’ve left all that to come to this place where it’s so cold his mother, Chee War, cries. She stands outside, ruing the thick sweaters and fat coats, hating how her body feels trapped in all the layers, wondering if she made a terrible mistake bringing everyone here. But then there’s Nyah and his brothers, scooping the snow into their hands, licking it like ice cream cones. And she can’t help but think, look how happy they are. It makes her wonder, maybe things will work out OK.

“We chose to come here not for my wife or for me, but for the kids. I didn’t want them to be poor and uneducated like what I faced,” says Nyah’s father, Ka Lee Wan, speaking through a translator in Burmese, his second language. It’s mid-August and he’s seated on a woven plastic mat in the family’s living room, leaning against a wall packed with photos: pictures of happy days in Utica and the refugee camp, their children tiny and smiling.

Ka Lee Wan is a quiet man, it’s usually his wife who does the talking. They met two decades ago at a dance at the refugee camp, when she was 19 and he was 21. Within two weeks they were married; within two years, their first son was born. It was Chee War, force of nature that she is, who decided one day they should apply to go to the U.S., that it would be the best move for their family.

For Chee War and Ka Lee Wan, life in some ways is so much harder in Utica than in the refugee camp. They don’t speak English; they feel like outsiders. That’s been the tradeoff of securing a better future for their kids, and for nine years it was a worthwhile one. “Before my son died, I was happy here,” says Ka Lee Wan. “Now, not so much.”

June 27, 2024, is another one of those happy days. Nyah wakes up, pulls out three white shirts that look almost identical and asks his mom to help him choose. In his house, there’s this big bag of traditional Karen shirts, woven tops for special occasions. Nyah’s proud of his culture, but today he wants something slick. The white dress shirt is sharp. It makes him look like a high school student, which he will be after today’s moving-up ceremony. It makes him look 14, a birthday just a few weeks away and one he’ll never see.

Nyah goes to the ceremony at James H. Donovan Middle School. He comes home and takes a picture with his mom; she has a Karen bag strapped across her chest, he’s holding his graduation certificate. They have these matching smiles; hers small and proud, his beaming.

Here’s the thing about Nyah’s family. Neither of his parents had any schooling. Nyah’s a golden child; sweet and charismatic, the type who tells his mom he loves her everytime he leaves the house. He likes drawing, he loves soccer, he goes to the gym and hangs out with his friends — there are always friends circling around this boy. His family can look at Nyah, at his nice life, and they might as well be watching that 5-year-old licking his snow-cone.

“I spent a very long time raising my kid. I did so many things to help him have a good life,” Chee War says in Karen. Her voice rises when she talks about June 28, one day after that graduation ceremony; the night Nyah Mway was shot dead.

“I want to ask those police, why did they do this to my son? If somebody killed their kid, their relative, what would they say?”

Incident on Shaw

On June 28, 2024, at 10:18 p.m., three police officers in two patrol cars pulled up to a pair of boys near the corner of Shaw and Bennett, saying they’d stopped them because one was “riding [his bicycle] in the roadway and one was walking,” Officer Bryce Patterson tells the boys, according to footage from a body-worn camera released by the Utica Police Department, or UPD.

Nyah, hoodie pulled over his cap, explains he’d forgotten it was against the law to walk in the street. “What do you mean you forgot about that?” Patterson asks, incredulous.

“Like, we was just having fun,” Nyah says, pointing toward his friend. “He’s living over there.”

Later, in statements, the UPD will explain they had stopped the pair while investigating a robbery where the suspects matched the boys’ description. They do not share this suspicion with the friend on his bike or with Nyah, who has to keep being reminded to pull his hands out of his sweatshirt pocket and keep them in the air. Instead, Patterson asks: “Can I just pat you down and make sure you got no weapons on you?”

This is when Nyah takes off, racing down the dark, empty streets. At one point he turns back toward them: the UPD says here is where he brandished what turned out to be a toy gun; Nyah’s supporters point out that’s far from evident on the footage released by the police.

What is not in dispute is that a 13-year-old, even a fit one who goes to the gym and loves soccer, cannot outrun three grown police officers. Less than a block later, in front of a shabby tan house, Patterson tackles Nyah to the ground. And then, quite suddenly, Officer Patrick Husnay catches up with the pair and shoots Nyah in the chest.

“Careful, you’re on camera,” a bystander, filming on her phone one stoop over, warns the officers as they race after Nyah. “Oh he punched him,” she screams a moment later, and then immediately after, as the single shot rings out: “Oh my god, he just; he just shot him.”

Nyah’s mother can’t begin to fathom how it came to this. Police are supposed to protect people, she says over and over. In this country — unlike her own — children's rights are sacrosanct. This is why they came here in the first place.

“They already arrested him, and they caught him, and they tied him up. They punched him twice. My kid couldn’t move. I just keep thinking: why didn’t the police contact the parents and talk to the parents at that time,” says Chee War. She puts her hands behind her back, mimes a punch, growing more animated as she talks about that unimaginable night.

“The police are supposed to contact the parent, let the parents know. If the kid makes a mistake, the police have to contact the parent, and I could ask my kid to take responsibility.”

Lt. Michael Curley, public information officer for the UPD, told Radio Free Asia that parents are always contacted for consent when an interrogation takes place. However, “in street encounters, the initial investigation does not always require that a parent be present or notification be made. It certainly is a case by case basis dependent on circumstances,” he wrote in an email.

In statements, UPD has said the boy was reaching for his toy gun, which police photos show looks identical to a glock. His lawyers have argued that the gun was retrieved far from the body. His supporters note the bystander who can be heard on the videos saying that Nyah was restrained and immobile when he was shot.

Some people in Utica talk a lot about that toy gun. They say it’s a tragedy the boy was carrying a thing no one could tell was fake; they say it’s awful, sure, but if that cop thought his life was in danger?

But for many in Utica’s Karen community, and a number of people outside of it, the shooting felt inevitable for a different reason. There’s so much discrimination against refugees, they say, so much harassment, some kind of tragedy was bound to happen sooner or later.

“I don’t want them [the police] to look down on the community; to think: they don’t know the culture, they don’t know the law. It doesn’t matter if they’re Karen, or Asian, or Black. I don’t like them looking down at refugees or anyone,” said Pyin Nyein Da, a Buddhist monk who has been active in Utica’s refugee community since moving there from Myanmar a decade ago.

The shooting of Nyah stunned Pyin Nyein Da along with many of his followers, he said. “It happened so quickly — in just one minute. I don’t want others to be next. Look at George Floyd; it’s just another case of them looking down on someone and killing them.”

‘The town that loves refugees’

Inside Myanmar, the Karen, an ethnic group of some 7 million people, have been fighting for autonomy since 1949 — one of the world’s longest-running civil wars. Tens of thousands of them live in Thai refugee camps that have existed so long they resemble walled-off villages more than anything else. It is from these border camps that nearly all of Utica’s Karen residents came from, qualifying for third-country resettlement as part of a U.S. State Department program that ended in 2014. In its nine years of existence, the program resettled more than 73,000 refugees from the Thai camps to the United States.

About 8,000 Karen refugees ended up in and around Utica, a former industrial city in upstate New York that has become well-known for its refugee resettlement efforts.

Over the last 45 years, an estimated 17,000 refugees who have come through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program have ended up in Utica, where today they make up about one-fifth of the population. They are from Vietnam, Bosnia and Rwanda; from Somalia, Myanmar and Afghanistan; from so many countries suffering so much conflict. Like those resettled in a slew of other former Rust Belt towns, the refugees who came to Utica brought with them a labor force for revitalized factories and children to fill the shrinking public schools and money to be sunk back into struggling local economies.

For a city whose population had been in steady decline since the 1970s, Utica’s new residents have helped staunch the outflow. Its wide, leafy streets may mostly seem quiet these days, but they’re far from abandoned: kids race each other on their bikes, popping wheelies and talking smack; grandparents tend vegetable plots full of eggplant and long beans. “The town that loves refugees” has become a popular moniker for Utica, cited in numerous articles and news reports.

Most refugees who ended up in Utica found safe harbor and some have genuinely thrived.

But there remains a divide that activists and community leaders here underscore: for all the pride Utica evinces about its refugee population, the reality is far more complicated. Decades after the first refugees came to Utica, no members of the school board are refugees, let alone Karen, nor are any members of the Common Council, the city’s legislative body. The UPD currently boasts a single Karen officer. While Utica’s mayor, Mike Galime, told RFA that such figures did not say anything meaningful about relations between the city and its refugee population, advocates feel differently.

“The city, the county, the state, they will be very quick to attribute the growth of Utica to being a city that loves refugees. But on the other hand, in terms of integration, it’s not there,” says Shana Dahlin, board president at Citizen Action, one of the local nonprofits that has been pushing for police reforms in the wake of Nyah Mway’s death. “We love your small businesses, we love to eat your food, we appreciate the schools being diverse, but in terms of the seats of power, those are still reserved for certain people.”

The killing of Nyah Mway, then, didn’t just devastate his family and his community — it ripped a jagged hole into the story Utica tells itself.

Two months after the shooting, Mayor Galime said he was committed to listening to the city’s Karen residents but admitted he was stumped by much of what he was hearing. The reality — as he understood it — simply didn’t track with what the community was now coming forth and saying, over and over, about their relationship with the city and with the UPD.

“We have a Karen firefighter, we do have a Karen police officer. We work hand in hand with The Center, which is the refugee center in Utica and have regular meetings,” he said in a recent phone interview, explaining that the city had long enjoyed an exemplary relationship with the Karen community.

“If you go back to when the Karen population was first coming to the city — it’s in actual news publications. You can see interviews just exemplifying the open relationship and good relationship between the entire refugee community that’s always proliferated in Utica, but specifically the Karen population.”

The three officers involved in the shooting have been put on paid leave, pending an internal investigation. New York’s attorney general has also opened an investigation. The Department of Justice has gotten involved, too, with plans to hold meetings between the community and local government — a type of mediation common in the wake of officer-involved shootings.

Justice for Nyah Mway, a group established by the family and activists, has called on the UPD and mayor’s office to institute a range of reforms. When they share their demands, the organizers point to a history of harassment and discrimination in Utica. But given the disconnect between what activists are saying and what the government is hearing, reform may well be a long, slow process.

“It’s hard because when these types of things are stated, you want to acknowledge it. But when you live the fact that some of these things are not the case it gets hard because then the conversation you’re having gets almost adversarial because you’re not agreeing,” said Mayor Galime.

“I’m taking every single critique seriously,” he added. “We’re just trying our best to take everything at face value so we can then move forward and repair that relationship.”

Karen Uticans told RFA numerous stories of feeling like they were looked down upon by their white neighbors and leaders; they shared examples of police harassment and ways in which the schools let them down. But, like the mayor, many also noted that — prior to Nyah’s death — things mostly seemed OK.

“The government and local Karen community had a good relationship before the shooting,” said the monk Pyin Nyein Da. “After Nyah Mway died, however, there’s been tension.”

If anyone wanted to keep their head down before, to write off moments of discrimination as misunderstanding, the shooting has coalesced something for many community members.

Now, said Pyin Nyein Da, panicked members of his temple are “comparing the [Utica] government to the [Myanmar] junta. They’re saying: ‘they’re killing us like a chicken.’”

‘I’ve seen a lot of discrimination’

On a Sunday in August, scores of congregants gathered in a stately church in downtown Utica, singing hymns in Karen while children dressed in suits and dresses careened past the pews. Nyah Mway may have grown up Buddhist, not Christian, but being Karen is what ties people together here.

Pastor Naw Htwe Cho, who heads the Utica Karen Wesleyan Church, didn’t know Nyah but was horrified when she heard about the shooting.

“It’s not fair, it’s unjust. That’s why I’ve been part of the demonstrations as much as I can,” she said in an interview, in Burmese and English. “I’ve been here 12 years, and I’ve seen a lot of discrimination.”

Unlike many others in the Karen American community, the pastor came to Utica not as a refugee transitioning out of a Thai camp but as a religious worker, invited to relocate from her Yangon church. That difference in background has made Naw Htwe Cho acutely aware of the challenges faced by her congregants — many of whom have struggled with the impacts of violence and a lack of education.

“In Burma, they’ve been living their whole life afraid of the police and military, and even here they’re still afraid when they see the police,” she explained. “They came here as refugees. They have a lot of trauma. Most of them are uneducated, and they’re afraid to talk.”

But if she views herself from a privileged position, many Uticans do not. A former interpreter, Naw Htwe Cho said she had stepped back from the job, burned out by how she and other Karen were treated.

“The people here, the local government. They really look down on us. They say: ‘You guys came from the jungle, you don’t know anything.’”

At its most extreme, that’s resulted in lesser services.

In 2015, the NY Attorney General’s Office brought a civil rights lawsuit against the Utica City School District, accusing them of bias against immigrant students with poor English. Those older than 16 were excluded from enrolling in the city’s only high school and shifted into a program described by the AG as an “educational dead-end.” The case mirrored a class-action suit brought earlier in the year by two civil liberties organizations, for Utica’s illegal barring of older, immigrant students. The city settled both cases the following year.

As a result of the settlements, the school district no longer diverts older students into a separate program, among other reforms.

But problems remain, said LuPway Doh, a college adviser who also serves as the head of the Utica Karen Community, a nonprofit that does everything from organize Karen ceremonies to help register voters.

“Even after the case, they don’t put in any extra effort,” he said. “They still don’t want to put the ESOL [English for Speakers of Other Languages] kids in the same class because they worry it will bring down the graduation rate.”

Naw Htwe Cho, who has two children, said she switched them to private school because of discrimination she’d witnessed at the public school. There, “some of the kids go to school only for one week and then don’t go anymore,” she added.

Such discrimination is felt even more acutely when it comes to community-police relationships, the pastor said. Naw Htwe Cho shared a story of being condescended to when she was stopped for speeding, then laughed when asked if others had similar experiences.

“Oh yes,” she said, before recounting an anecdote about a friend who was driving with his kid when the police stopped him, put him in handcuffs and searched his car before letting him go. “Everyone has their own story dealing with the police.”

‘It could happen to anyone’

When the shooting occurred, activists were quick to highlight what they said was a culture of harassment by the UPD. For all the mayor’s claims of excellent relations between the UPD and the Karen community, numerous Karen Uticans have come forward with stories of negative police interactions.

“We came from war, we came from ethnic cleansing, when you come from those types of violence and see police brutality you recognize it,” said Kay Klo, a community organizer who helped the family establish Justice for Nyah Mway. “You can’t gaslight us.”

Twenty-four-year-old Kah Gay Soe said he’s routinely harassed by the police, and had been stopped while driving three times in recent years. Each time he was handcuffed by police as they searched his car, he said, only to be released without so much as a ticket. Though Kah Gay Soe has lived in the U.S. since age 11, he spoke through a translator, saying he didn’t feel comfortable being interviewed in English.

“Because we don’t speak English well, they do whatever they want to us,” said Kah Gay Soe. “In other communities, police protect people … not here.”

He pointed toward a group of his friends, all young men. One had been stopped five times, he said, one four. None wanted to talk to a journalist, but he said that all had been pulled over on flimsy excuses and released without charges.

Nyah’s shooting, said Kah Gay Soe, “shouldn’t have happened, but it could happen to anyone. Me, my brother, my niece or nephew.”

RFA asked the UPD how the department trains officers to handle encounters with citizens who don’t speak English as a first language and what efforts are made at community engagement.

Curley, the UPD spokesman, said each time a new group of refugees is resettled in Utica, the police hold joint trainings with The Center — a nonprofit focused on refugee resettlement and integration.

“We discuss cultural differences, law enforcement related topics, resettlement issues, and really the gamut of any conversation that arises,” he wrote in an email. He said police regularly hold “cultural competency trainings” and strive to maintain good community relationships. He added that translating services are available “at all hours.”

Asked about the many complaints shared with RFA by members of the Karen community, he responded that “there have been no documented claims” of harassment or discrimination filed to the UPD from Karen Uticans.

“Prior to the unfortunate death of Nyah Mway the Utica Police Department’s relationship with our Karen and Burmese Community was good. The department was not made aware of any issues or problems that existed prior to this incident by any of the leadership from this community,” he wrote in an email.

Allegations of discrimination and harassment, he insisted, “are false and baseless in our opinion.”

The long fight

One month ago, on Sep. 17, Chee War filed a notice of claim against the City of Utica alleging an unlawful stop, excessive force, and a wrongful death, along with at least half a dozen other offenses committed by the city and UPD.

The notice preserves the family’s right to file a lawsuit if they so wish in the next 15 months, according to the Daily Sentinel.

Only a miniscule portion of police involved in shootings end up being tried and even fewer convicted, meaning lawsuits are often the sole means in which families can find justice. A 2022 Washington Post investigation found that more than $1.5 billion was paid out in police misconduct settlements over the prior decade.

Since Nyah Mway’s shooting, community leaders have been involved in an array of related activities: vigils, demonstrations, meetings. Often, the role involves explaining how slowly the wheels of justice grind.

“In the beginning there was a lot of anger,” said community leader LuPway Doh. “We got blamed, as leaders, [for nothing happening]. We try to explain that it will take years. But they think we should talk to the city, get the police arrested. If the investigation comes out and there’s no charges, the community is going to get angrier.”

As quiet as things may appear on the surface, it’s clear Nyah’s shooting has sparked something inside a community that had been sidelined for far too long, he explained.

“We thought we escaped the violence and the persecution. This brings back a lot of trauma.”

‘That type of kid’

A small community full of people who share the same language, the same memories of war, the same unlikely second chance in a country where things are supposed to be so much better than back home; they’re going to be touched by a tragedy as inexplicable as June 28. There’s these ties that bind you so when something like this happens, maybe you feel it in a deeper way: Nyah could be your kid, your brother, your friend.

On July 6, the family held Nyah’s funeral. Hundreds came; many who knew Nyah but many who didn’t. On July 13, nearly 1,000 Uticans marched through the street. On Aug. 8, the day that would have been his 14th birthday, friends and strangers held a vigil in the rain for Nyah. His house is still just a house: there’s a fish tank and a bunch of kids’ shoes on the porch and family pictures on the walls. But it’s also something more now — a shrine. Along one wall stand large-format photos of Nyah, the ones people held up at his funeral, protest and vigil. There’s a hand-written poster that says: “Don’t shoot I want to grow up.”

So here’s Nyah, one day after middle school graduation, on the verge of a brand new world. He’s alive and well, living a life that must seem so unimaginable to his relatives back in that place he can’t really think of as home. Because this is home, Utica. This place where the snow drifts are sometimes as tall as his little sister; where his friends come from all over the world but like exactly the same stuff as him: rap and biking and swimming in the creek.

There’s problems in the community, sure, but at 13 it’s clear Nyah’s not really touched by them. He hasn’t had any serious issues in school, hasn’t had trouble becoming as fluent in English as any native speaker. If the cops harass others, it’s not something that’s affected him. He’s so young he doesn’t even know enough not to run when the police stop him.

That day, the 28th, Nyah sleeps all day. He’s tired from his moving-up ceremony, from the festivities. Come evening, his buddies stop by and ask his mom to send him out.

“I said, don’t come back later than 8 or 9 p.m.,” Chee War recounts in an August interview. “He said ‘OK, love you, mom,’ and he left with his friends. He was that type of kid, he’d always say ‘I love you, mom’ when he went out.”

“He was really social,” adds his aunt, Soe Ka Byar. “Whoever he met, he hugged them and said, I love you.”

A friend, Chris Sunderlin, has stopped by the family home with a picture of the headstone the family has been working on. The two women look at the mockup now. It says, in Karen: “Mom and Dad love you. We all miss you and will never forget you.” Above the words, there’s a photo of Nyah, wearing his middle school graduation robe. He’s got that wide smile of a kid who has the whole world in front of him.