Again
I have lived in apartments for a significant portion of my life, and for a significant portion of my life I have been driven bonkers by The People Upstairs. There was the woman who slammed down the toilet lid every time she flushed, and the family that let their four-year-old run around the rugless floor like a puppy on crack, and Six A.M. Exercise Man, and don't get me started about the music. So I completely get the impulse to go up there and kill somebody. I never did, because I knew that a. It's wrong, and b. I wouldn't get away with it.
It remains to be seen whether Officer Amber Guyger of the Dallas Police Department will get away with killing her upstairs neighbor, Botham Jean. (Let's get this out of the way -- she's white and he was black.) Her story is that she parked her car on the wrong level of the apartment complex, proceeded to the wrong apartment, found the door ajar, walked into a completely dark apartment, saw a large silhouette in an interior doorway, shouted some official police-type commands, and then put two rounds in the torso of what she assumed was a burglar/rapist/who the hell knows. Anyway, she feared for her life.
The complex manager's story is that he got noise complaints from Mr. Jean's downstairs neighbor, which would be Officer Guyger. The story of two witnesses is that they heard a woman pounding on Mr. Jean's door and shouting, "Let me in!" shortly before the gunshots. So that's a manager and two residents with nothing to gain by lying versus a white cop with two bullets missing from her service weapon. Sounds pretty conclusive --
No! Hold on! The local Fox station reports that marijuana was discovered during a search of the dead black man's home. Crazed on drugs, who knows what he might have done? He didn't have a gun, but neither did scary Michael Brown in Ferguson. Manslaughter? Maybe they'll throw her a parade.
Eating Cereal In Your Own Apartment While Black. Botham Jean joins the never-ending list of fatalities that probably began when a kidnapped African made a run for it on the Charleston docks in the seventeenth century. The next time someone says Black Lives Matter is demanding white genocide, the next time some racist calls Colin Kaepernick a "son of a bitch," think of the many thousand gone. Gone and still going.
It remains to be seen whether Officer Amber Guyger of the Dallas Police Department will get away with killing her upstairs neighbor, Botham Jean. (Let's get this out of the way -- she's white and he was black.) Her story is that she parked her car on the wrong level of the apartment complex, proceeded to the wrong apartment, found the door ajar, walked into a completely dark apartment, saw a large silhouette in an interior doorway, shouted some official police-type commands, and then put two rounds in the torso of what she assumed was a burglar/rapist/who the hell knows. Anyway, she feared for her life.
The complex manager's story is that he got noise complaints from Mr. Jean's downstairs neighbor, which would be Officer Guyger. The story of two witnesses is that they heard a woman pounding on Mr. Jean's door and shouting, "Let me in!" shortly before the gunshots. So that's a manager and two residents with nothing to gain by lying versus a white cop with two bullets missing from her service weapon. Sounds pretty conclusive --
No! Hold on! The local Fox station reports that marijuana was discovered during a search of the dead black man's home. Crazed on drugs, who knows what he might have done? He didn't have a gun, but neither did scary Michael Brown in Ferguson. Manslaughter? Maybe they'll throw her a parade.
Eating Cereal In Your Own Apartment While Black. Botham Jean joins the never-ending list of fatalities that probably began when a kidnapped African made a run for it on the Charleston docks in the seventeenth century. The next time someone says Black Lives Matter is demanding white genocide, the next time some racist calls Colin Kaepernick a "son of a bitch," think of the many thousand gone. Gone and still going.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 11:17 AM
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