A sickly looking white man driving a red truck; an African-American woman going with her three daughters to a convenience store for breakfast supplies in the darkness of a Houston morning; shots ringing out and penetrating the car.
That chaotic confluence of vehicles, people and weapons exploded recently into a frenzied reaction to an event in which a 7-year-old girl named Jazmine Barnes was killed in a drive-by shooting.
Jazmine
The shooting not only took the life of a happy second-grader, it also triggered a rally — attended by hundreds — with seething racial overtones, the participants believing it had been a straight-up, white-on-black hate crime.
As it now stands, however, this was a case of one horrible mistake on top of another. First, the sickly looking white man — so described by an occupant of LaPorsha Washington’s car, the car in which Jazmine was riding — apparently had nothing to do with the crime. Police now believe he might simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. After or during the shooting, he drove off. Police are still looking for him to find out what he knows.
Second, it was a black man, being driven by another black man, who shot into Washington’s car. They — and here’s the most maddening thing about this heartbreaking and opaque tragedy — attacked because they mistook the car for one whose occupants they had argued with hours earlier.
After the Dec. 30 shooting, Washington, who was wounded in the arm, told The Houston Chronicle she believed the attack was racially motivated, and the case whipped up attention from civil rights activists across the country.
“I have no tint on my windows or anything so you can see there is a mother — a black mother — with daughters, beautiful children,” Washington told CNN. “You took my baby from me and you have no care in the world.”
LaPorsha Washington at a rally in Houston on Saturday
Nothing in that quote was inaccurate, but within the context of her allegation that the shooter was white, it whipped many people into a frenzy.
And then things started to turn.
Shaun King, a social justice activist and journalist, got a tip that the the shooting had been a case of mistaken identity and that the initials of the men involved in the shooting were “LW” and “EB.” The tipster said the two men did not realize they had shot into the wrong vehicle until they saw TV news reports the night of the shooting.
On the basis of the tip, investigators arrested 20-year-old Eric Black Jr. Saturday after stopping him for a lane-change violation. On Sunday he was charged with capital murder after telling police he had been driving the vehicle and a companion had shot into Washington’s car. The second man has been identified as 24-year-old Larry Woodruffe. He was already in custody on drug charges and is likely to be charged in Jazmine’s killing.
…And then there’s the confounding element of the sickly looking white man driving the red truck. After the shooting, police distributed a composite sketch of the man and considered him a suspect on the basis of a description given by 15-year-old Alxis Dilbert, Washington’s oldest daughter, who had been sitting in the front passenger seat, directly in front of Jazmine.
Alxis told police she noticed a red truck pull up beside their vehicle. She described the driver as a blue-eyed white man wearing a black hoodie and looking sickly. She didn’t think much about the truck until it changed lanes, moving around to the driver’s side of the Washington vehicle. The girl said the man then opened fire.
As they should have, Harris County Sheriff’s Department investigators released the composite sketch (below left), as well as a frame from a video that showed the red truck (below center).
After the incident started coming into clearer focus, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez pointed out something we all know — that in an instantly developing accident or crime, it is very easy for witnesses and victims to form erroneous impressions of what took place.
“It went down very quickly when the gunfire erupted,” Gonzalez said. “You’re talking about small children; they witnessed something very traumatic, and it’s very likely the last thing they did see was indeed that red truck — and the driver in that red truck — and that’s what they remember last.”
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Now, after all the tumult and all the ramped-up feelings, we’re left with one problem that has been with us a long time and will be with us for a long time to come: race relations.
The other thing we’re left with: the loss of an innocent girl who was barely old enough to be thinking about becoming a teenager, much less the possibility of a violent death.
We truly are a broken people, aren’t we?
Broken people, indeed. Useless metaphors: Pandora’s box; returning the genie to the bottle; Humpty Dumpty. Fear, hate and anger have energy, which can consume us if we continue to allow it to take over. Knowledge is power, but if special interests prevent us from even gathering the data showing the health threat that unlimited firearms pose, how can we face the facts that might help us find a way out of this cycle?
America has always had guns. When I was in school decades ago, we had a rifle range in the school and deputies taught us firearm safety. When I lived in North Dakota it was common to see rifles in the back windows of pickups. In neither case were there the kinds of shootings we see now.
The problem isn’t guns, the problem is that we live in a sick society. Our culture is shit and it isn’t going to improve soon.
I think much stricter gun control would be of significant help over a period of many years — it would take a long, long time to greatly reduce the number of guns circulating on the streets — but the sinking state of society is just as big a problem. The indicators of hope are in short supply.
John, same with my Southeast High School ROTC. In fact, when I was 15 my neighbor and I took our .22 rifles packed in denim sleeves, fishing rods and bedrolls, walked two blocks to the 63rd Street bus, rode west to Brookside, transferred to the Main Street bus to Union Station, hopped on the Rock Island passenger train to Trenton, took a town cab out into the country to his family’s farm between Spickardsville and Modena in northern Grundy County and went camping for a week. That was in 1964. Times have changed. It’s not just guns, or the proliferation, but our delusion that more of them makes us safer. That friend who’s farm we traveled to, used a handgun to take his life in his late 30s. Two of our Boy Scout troop members were also killed by gun violence. Another served in combat in Vietnam, was wounded but survived. Mortal risk is closer than we think.