A 14-year-old girl who was at the center of a Grand Rapids Police Department controversy has died of complications of COVID-19, according to her grandmother.
Honestie Hodges, 14, tested positive for COVID-19 on November 9 according to a GoFundMe page directed by her grandmother. After being sent home initially, she was transported by ambulance shortly thereafter to Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital when becoming more ill. By November 14, she was placed on a ventilator and did not recover.
In December 2017, a then 11-year-old Honestie was handcuffed at gunpoint by officers and placed in a cruiser as they searched for a suspect in an attempted murder. Hodges, her mother and another relative were just leaving their Grand Rapids home when they encountered police looking for one of their relatives in a stabbing.
The incident resulted in changes to GRPD’s policy of interaction with children, and was dubbed “The Honestie Policy.”
Honestie herself had asked in a press conference, “I have a question for the Grand Rapids police: If this happened to a white child, if her mother was screaming, ‘She’s 11,’ would you have handcuffed her and put her in the back of a police car?”
This report is from MLive.
Also see here.
A additional report confirmed that a child at DeVos Children’s Hospital had died of multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, also known as MIS-C. MIS-C is a rare inflammatory condition that occurs in children mainly after a COVID-19 recovery.
Hospital officials could not give specific information about the victim’s age or time of death, but said there had been several children admitted to the hospital with MIS-C over the past few months, including at least two in the last week.
For more info on this report including information about MIS-C, see here.