KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ After 11 p.m. last Monday, she called her son to check on him. A police officer answered.
In the background, Nafeesa Fajri heard her son yell: "Mama they got me and they kneed me in my face!"
Her heart dropped.
Later, her son, Malik Cervantes, would tell her that they chased him down as he was trying to leave the protests in Kansas City on Monday night. That officers were cracking jokes as they cornered him. That an officer knelt on his back and another officer kneed him in the face twice. Later, he would show her the bruises.
But in the moment, she had one fear: that her son would be the next George Floyd.
"That's why you see the entire nation rally, because we're tired," Fajri said. "Because we know easily, George Floyd could have been any one of us."
Hundreds of people have turned out to the Country Club Plaza each day for the past week to protest the killings of black Americans by police and call for change. About 230 have been arrested since the demonstrations began Friday, according to the Kansas City Police Department.
Police have used tear gas and pepper spray in attempts to control the crowd.
Both Cervantes, 23, and Fajri, 41, protested on Friday. On Saturday, just Cervantes went, but Fajri drove around Westport to check on him. When she drove by him, their eyes locked and she knew he was OK. She told him, "I love you. Be safe."
Cervantes was back on Monday. Fajri didn't know.
But he would have felt like a hypocrite for not protesting, he said.
"I grew up on Trayvon Martin," said Cervantes, who was 15 at the time of Martin's killing. "He wasn't doing nothing." He called George Zimmerman's acquittal a "slap in the face."
Monday was the fourth night of protests in Kansas City against police brutality, sparked by the death of a black man, George Floyd, who was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on his neck for several minutes.
On Monday, Mayor Quinton Lucas spoke with protesters, prayed with them and led people on a march. Cervantes said the mayor had told people that they could stay as long as the protest remained nonviolent.
About 15 to 20 minutes after Lucas left, Cervantes said, it started to escalate.
He watched someone in a Spiderman costume get arrested.
Police deployed tear gas and scattered the protesters at Mill Creek Park. Cervantes helped one girl get to safety.
Later, Cervantes was with three of his friends, all women, near the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art when police began surrounding them. He told his friends to run to the car and he took off in another direction. He told them to run because he knew police would focus on him.
He was running, he said, to survive.
On 47th Street, as he walked near Winstead's, he saw an unmarked car move closer. Then several officers were chasing him again.
They asked him, "Where are you going to run now?" Another officer said "Tyreek Hill ain't got nothing on him," as others laughed.
One officer got out of the car with his hand on his gun in its holster.
Then, Cervantes said, he got on the ground in the Winstead's parking lot and put his hands up.
One officer put his knee on Cervantes' back, causing him to gasp for air. When another officer kneed him twice in the head, he said that's when he thought "it was going to get real." Officers told him to stop resisting.
"I wasn't resisting," he said.
Then his mother called his phone and he heard one of the officers answer. He shouted for his mother and told her what was happening.
He lay on the ground before an officer came up to him, slapped him twice on the cheek and told him to get up. Then, they took him to a police precinct.
Fajri, meanwhile, was panicked. After hanging up on the police officer who didn't tell her where her son was being taken, she drove to the Plaza and walked up to officers by the fountain to ask them. The streets, she said, were dark and full of cops. The only protesters she saw were walking in the other direction. .
"My son was falsely arrested," she told an officer as she attempted to find out where he was taken, but she was given conflicting messages about where.
She called the Metro Patrol Police Station and no one answered. Fajri called the Central Patrol station and the person on duty looked up her son in the system. He wasn't there.
She drove to the Metro Patrol Station at 7601 Prospect Avenue, where she was told it was likely that her son hadn't been booked yet. Thirty minutes passed, then another 30 minutes. Then, she saw a bus pull up to the station.
Finally, Cervantes showed up in the system. She was told his bail would be $1,000 in cash or $200 through a bail bondsman. But none of the bondsmen she called that night _ it was just after 1 a.m. on Tuesday by then _ were answering.
Then, a woman walked into the station. She turned out to be a bondsman there to let someone else out, but helped Fajri bond out her son. It took another 20 minutes for him to walk out, Fajri said.
"I could see the look of defeat," she said. "He's a strong-willed kid. To see that ... it hurts."
She hugged him tight, tighter than she had ever held anything or anyone in her life. His chest was caving and his breathing was shallow, she said, as he said, "I love you."
Fajri and Cervantes spent an hour together at home. By 3 a.m. Tuesday, he was heading back to the precinct to bail out one of his friends.
"He went down there so his voice could be heard," Fajri said. "(Police) value those buildings more than Kansas City lives."
Parents of black children are fighting an uphill battle, Fajri said, to keep their children safe but not stifle their voice. But their mind, their skin, even their voice, is seen as a threat, she said.
"We can't just be killed at the mercy of the police because they're not here to serve and protect us," said Fajri, who recently accepted an assistant basketball coaching job at University Academy. "They're here to serve and protect themselves."
She said she used to believe that police departments only had a "few bad apples." Not anymore. Those bad cops have put a blemish on everything, she said.
Kansas City police spokesman Capt. Dave Jackson said several arrests have been made, but couldn't add clarity or speak to the specific forced used in Cervantes' case.
"Historically, the vast majority of arrests we make require no force at all," Jackson said.
The ticket Cervantes was given was for not remaining on the sidewalk. Mayor Lucas on Thursday said he would consider pardoning nonviolent protesters facing municipal charges.
Complaints can be filed with the police department's Office of Community Complaints, which is responsible for protecting citizens from police misconduct. Citizens can also file complaints of police misconduct and excessive force with the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office.
For now, Cervantes and his mother are waiting for direction from the American Civil Liberties Union.
One of Cervantes' bond conditions, highlighted in blue by Fajri, was to not return to the Plaza.
"I think I have to laugh it off a little bit just to keep myself sane," said Cervantes, who works in renovation contracting and is the oldest of four. "Or I'd sit there and I'd just be angry about it all day. ... There's just a lot of anger in my heart."
He hasn't decided yet, but he might be back. He wants to be heard.
