Rian Yalamanchili, a 25-year-old Rhode Islander, reacted to the grand jury decision to not indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, like many people across the country — with grief and confusion.
“I was just really shocked and devastated,” Yalamanchili said.
What started as a preoccupation for Rian, reading newspaper headline after newspaper headline about Ferguson, turned into a group project. Rian gathered eight Brown University medical students and two professors — Dr. Elizabeth Laposata and Dr. Lundy Braun. Together, they combed through the raw evidence released by NPR from the prosecutors.
(Photo credit: National Public Radio)
“As I started to read through them, I was trying to put myself in other people’s shoes, like non- med student mode, and I was thinking ‘wow this would be very difficult to read and understand,” Yalamanchili said.
“If they translated all the jargon, if that were the case I think then that’s true transparency. But it really didn’t seem like that.
Four-thousand, seven hundred and ninety-nine pages is hard for anyone to digest, let alone a team of bright, medical students and faculty. Rian says his team spent a total of 80 hours translating the medical documents from the Ferguson case. They worked through Thanksgiving and into December, on top of their responsibilities as students and teachers.
Rian says throughout those months, his team began to unravel the disconnect between media portrayals of Ferguson and the medical evidence.
“Everyone was saying, ‘Oh he was only shot from the front,’ or ‘Oh he was only shot from the back,’ and you know, it’s still kind of up for grabs to really tell,” Yalamanchili said.
“There’s no real way to determine based on what the bullet entries were whether or not he was facing towards the officer or away from the officer at the time of his death.”
Rian says clearing up these points of contention and confusion made translating the medical documents worthwhile. His team published their findings online — at
fergusondecoded.org — so people can be informed about the case and make their own judgments.
“We tried to eliminate as much personal opinion and bias from our translations because we didn’t want this to only attract one side of the argument or the other,” Yalamanchili said.
Rian says the project will continue this semester. His team will investigate the federal and private autopsies that have been released, while extending outreach to the Rhode Island community and students across disciplines.
But aspiring lawyers and police officers are not the only people that can help with Rian’s project.
“Students who are really involved with biophysics will be able to help us really understand the gunshot wounds, or for example, someone who is really good at art could help us do a really anatomical representation of all these different gunshot wounds.”
“It really could be anyone.”
