Philando Castile's girlfriend says she filmed his shooting 'so that the people could see'

Lavish Reynolds, the girlfriend of the late Philando Castile, made her first public appearance since livestreaming Castile’s killing by a police officer in Falcon Heights, MN on Wednesday night.

Reynolds spoke at a rally in front of Governor Mark Dayton’s residence in St. Paul on Thursday morning.

She described riding with Castile as they and her four-year-old daughter dropped off a family member near the site of the shooting. The car, Reynolds said, had been pulled over for an allegedly broken tail light. Once they stopped, the officer who pulled them over told Castile to put his hands in the air, and then produce license and registration.

“As [Castile] is reaching for his back pocket wallet, he lets the officer know ‘officer, I have a firearm on me.’ Reynolds explained. “I begin to yell ‘but he has a license to carry!’ After that [the officer] begins to take off shots—boom boom boom boom.”

“How can you not move when you’re asking for license and registration?” Reynolds, growing visibly upset, continued.

She connected herself and Castile to some of the other black people whose deaths turned them into martyrs.

“I’m Trayvon Martin, you’re Trayvon Martin,” she said, as an onlooker placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’re Sandra [Bland], you’re Sandra [Bland]. We are the people! And we can’t keep allowing these people who are supposed to serve and protect us to take us away.”

She described Castile’s relationship with the children he worked with at the nearby JJ Hill Montessori school. “Some of y’all kids might know him” she said, scanning the crowd around her. “They love him,” an off-camera onlooker replied. Reynolds also praised her daughter, who was in the car with Castile when he was shot, describing her as a “super-shero.”

Reynolds explained that she posted the livestream of Castile’s death online because she wanted it to “go viral so that the people could see,” adding later “I didn’t do it for pity, I didn’t do it for fame. I did it so that the world knows that these police are not here to protect and serve us. They are here to assassinate us. They are here to kill us. Because we are black.”

You can watch all of Reynold’s speech below.

As the rally continued, crowds outside the governor’s mansion reportedly began chanting “the whole damn system is guilty as hell.”