Sarah Moore Character Analysis

A freckly white girl with blue eyes and brown hair, Sarah Moore is the middle-school-aged daughter of Officer Moore, who shoots Jerome Rogers to death after mistaking the toy gun in his hand for a real firearm. At the hearing to determine whether Officer Moore will face charges for killing Jerome, Sarah is the only person who can see Jerome’s ghost. When Jerome—lonely haunting a living world where no one has been able to perceive him—starts visiting Sarah at home, she initially makes excuses for her father, but she is also shocked to see that, despite her father’s claims that Jerome was threatening and looked like an adult, Jerome is just a kid the same height as she is. She apologizes to Jerome and suggests they become friends. She is even more shocked when the ghost of historical lynching victim Emmett Till appears during one of her and Jerome’s conversations and shows them thousands of ghosts of Black boys killed in contexts similar to that of Jerome’s death. After watching the video of Jerome’s shooting—in which her father didn’t ask Jerome to put his hands up or give Jerome first aid—Sarah is devastated. She is further devastated after researching Emmett Till’s lynching. Sarah stops speaking to her father and creates a website to document racist murders of Black boys, hoping that public education will prevent more such murders from occurring. Eventually, Jerome tells Sarah to start talking to her father again and to teach him how not to fear Black boys out of prejudice. When Sarah and Jerome say goodbye, she promises never to let anyone forget him—and takes his advice, convincing her father to help her with her website project memorializing Jerome and others killed under similar circumstances.