Former UNC football star describes first police encounter: ‘I was too scared to move’

When he was 12 years old, before he would play football at North Carolina or be a high school football coach in Cabarrus County, Jupiter Wilson was walking home from a grocery store in Virginia Beach.

He still wonders how his life might’ve been different if a police confrontation 26 years ago hadn’t turned out the way it did.

Wilson was walking home with his two cousins, heading back to his aunt and uncle’s house. The boys each were eating ice cream. As the three kids, all 14 or under, crossed a street, a police car came up on them fast, starting to make a right turn before it stopped suddenly in the middle of a rural road.

Before any of the boys knew what was happening, one of the officers, Wilson said, had grabbed the oldest boy and forcibly pushed him back against a car.

“Stop what you’re doing!” one of the officers yelled.

The police said the boys, ice cream dripping down their fingers, fit the description of a burglary nearby.

“I was too scared to move,” Wilson said. “We were just standing there watching.

“I was numb.”

Local meeting to improve race relations

The George Floyd controversy and protests sparked this memory in Wilson, 38, that he waited nearly 20 years to tell his parents about. And it’s part of the reason he’s helping to organize a meeting between Cabarrus County high school football coaches and local police at a private residence Monday night.

“I just really feel like we need to speak out about these things,” Wilson said.

Part of the reason Wilson is pushing for Monday’s gathering came after a white resource officer at Hickory Ridge High School — where Wilson is head football, track and girls basketball coach — asked him if the Floyd incident might damage a bond that was built between the officer and the school’s black students.

“We just hope to get every resource officer in Cabarrus County,” Wilson said, “and talk about what we can do as coaches to help kids, and what needs to take place to improve the relationship between police officers and kids.”

Wilson remembers coaching at predominately white Hickory High in Chesapeake, Va, and Wilson had built an all-black staff. Wilson said one night, after losing to a rival, someone from the other team shouted to him and his defensive coordinator in the post game handshake line: “Hey, that’s what happens when you get an all-(N word) staff.’”

“My defensive line coach tapped me on the shoulder,” Wilson remembers. “He said, ‘Did you hear that?’”

In November 2017, Chesapeake Public Schools investigated an incident where a student was dressed in a Klu Klux Klan robe and hood and making the Nazi salute at a Halloween party.

Monday, Wilson plans to share these types of experiences.

“It’s kind a tale of the tape,” Wilson said, “and these things happen, and I said I need to speak out on these things.”

Something else he will share happened two years ago. Wilson was driving when he noticed an officer following him for several minutes. Wilson got nervous, not too different from when he was a little boy in Virginia so many years ago.

“I remembered thinking, ‘If he turns the sirens on, I’ll drive to a lighted area,’” Wilson said. “I had never thought about that before. So when this last situation happened (with George Floyd), I said, ‘Jupe, you gotta do more.’”

A lesson learned, hopeful wisdom to pass on

Wilson was an All-American lineman in high school in Virginia, who signed with North Carolina. As a Tar Heel, he was a four-year letterman who won the Jack Sapp Award as the team’s best all-around senior in 2003.

After college, Wilson had tryouts with the NFL’s Cleveland Browns and Tampa Bay Bucs but didn’t make it. He gravitated toward teaching and coaching while playing a few years in the Arena League. Wilson landed a pair of assistant coaching jobs at Monroe High and at Vance before he left, in 2011, to become head coach at Hickory (VA) High, his alma mater. He stayed there for seven seasons.

Wilson came back to North Carolina two years ago, first as an assistant at Hickory Ridge and now he’ll start his second season as head coach this fall.

But he said all of that could’ve been different if the grocery store incident had gone a little differently. Watching Floyd laying on the ground, begging for his mother, telling an officer he couldn’t breathe — while that officer kept his knee on his neck — was difficult for Wilson to watch.

It sent him back to his youth.

“Two officers jumped out of the car,” Wilson said remembering his encounter. “And one of them grabbed my cousin and threw him against the car. They read us the riot act. I was more scared and more shocked because I’d never had any encounter with the police until that point. I’d seen people get pulled over for speeding, but this was my first encounter. It was like, ‘Wow did I do something wrong? Is something terrible going to happen to me?’”

After about 10 minutes, which Wilson said felt like an hour, the boys were let go.

They walked to home, in near dead silence, ate dinner, and didn’t’ breath a word of it for years.

Wilson now feels it’s time to talk.

And that’s why the football coaches — four of whom are black — and the police officers will gather Monday night. The hope is that one talk becomes several, and eventually, each school can have a few players participate, even if it has to be through video conferencing.

The message, Wilson said, is too important.

“A lot of times, we as men, we don’t say anything,” Wilson said. “People are hurting, and the biggest thing I want to accomplish is to have some sense of an open dialogue between police officers and the community we live in, and have those people address these issues. That way, you don’t have that elephant in the room or the feeling that all police officers are bad. I know that’s not always the case and a lot of times, these situations paint everybody with one good or bad stroke. We just want to have an open dialogue.

“We just want to have a start.”