Introducing #MATTER

When Gerald Hayes witnesses his teenage son Niles’s brutal beating by police officers, a split second decision leads to him being barricaded in a friend’s nearby restaurant with one of the officers. As the situation deteriorates and the press paints Niles as the offender, Gerald fights for justice for his son using the one tool at his disposal in that moment - social media. Told through the lens of an investigative journalist, Kate Bell takes us back to that fateful afternoon and its aftermath a year later through interviews, found surveillance footage and more.

#MATTER premieres February 9th. Subscribe today.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Introducing Hashtag Matter, a brand new eight episode scripted podcast. Michelle, Okay, yeah,
come on here. And last night I was thinking about
canceling all you. And it's not that I don't want
to do this, it's just a lot to revisit. Everything

(00:22):
has happened, response happening, Thank you. We already responded to
that location in response to a shoot You're gonna point.
A little over twelve months ago, an eighteen year old

(00:43):
African American young man named Niles Hayes was driving a
family friends luxury vehicle when he was stopped for a
routine traffic violation. Things escalate quickly. Now his father, Gerald Hayes,
sees his son in peril and instinctively rushes into the
fray to protect him from Shonda land Audio in partnership

(01:08):
with I Heart Radio. I'm author and journalist Kate Bell,
and this is hashtag matter. Within hours of the police stop,
footage of the entire altercation between Niles and the investing
officers gets posted online and it goes viral. Gerald is
a hero for taking madis into his own hands. And

(01:30):
if you can't see that, then I'm not working with you.
I'm Colleen Sanders and We're here live from the Los
Angeles Valley outside of Jace's forty two sports bar and Grill,
where a carjacking suspect opened fire on police, leaving one
officer dead and the second officer wounded. This case presented
a lot of challenges from the start. Once the HTS

(01:51):
retreated into the building, the standoff had begun. You got
the whole l a p D outside of my building
ready to light in hire block up. I mean, any
number of outcomes could have happened if different choices were made. Doctor, Doctor,
I guess what I am struggling with. Come, okay, you
struggle with it because you live in a different reality

(02:13):
than we do. So let me ask you something. If
a man sees his child getting beat down in the
street like a dog, what is a man supposed to do?
From now on? We gotta do something different. If we
really want to understand what went on that day, we
have to get into Gerald's head. And in order to

(02:35):
do this right, the first thing we have to do
is go back to the beginning, the part you don't know.
Hashtag Matter premieres February nine on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast,