Years ago I saw an elderly woman carrying an armload of scrap lumber away from a construction site. Apparently for firewood. She got confused in the middle of the street, dropped the lumber and scurried over to the curb. I pulled over and as I gathered up the wood scraps from the street. The woman shouted:
“Hey Joe, attsa mine, keep off, donna touch, attsa mine”
Undeterred I carried the stuff up her driveway and dumped it on the garage floor, which produced:
“You really nice a boy, you my son”
Illiterate immigrant broad. A real citizen would have shot her.
Hey, @Darren_Garrison , now that the facts are out and the murderers convicted, have you changed your mind, or do you think 3 innocent men are going to jail?
I still do not accept the narrative that they chose a random black person simply because they were black and deliberately intended to kill him from the beginning which is the narrative that I was fighting against. I still believe that their intent was to detain him until the police got there, and it ended in death because they made a long chain of stupid and wreckless decisions.
I agree that it properly followed the law. But I still feel bad that so many lives were destroyed by their actions, even their own lives. Because I still think that their intentions to help out a neighbor were good, even it went really badly wrong.
I do feel a bit bad for the property owner, who has to carry the guilt that some vigilantes decided to hunt and kill someone while claiming to do it for him.
Out of curiosity, if someone holds up a convenience store, and either is killed in the process or goes to jail, and has their life destroyed, do you feel bad for them?
The KKK was formed with the greatest intentions of helping out the neighborhood as well.
I don’t see why “intentions to help a neighbor” should count when the neighbor didn’t want their help. Or when the type of "help they gave included kidnapping and assault.
The lives lost seem to me to be because these guys thought they had the right to take the law into their own hands. They were convicted for doing something that any normal person would know you shouldn’t do.
And maybe an actual conviction and sufficiently harsh punishment on this sort of thing will finally discourage all the other would-be vigilantes to back off. Because, yeah, if you plan on using violence to enforce your “detainment” to “help the police,” then you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Also, it has occurred to me, @Darren_Garrison, that you thought I called you racist. I did not. I still think these guys had racist motivations, based on the things you yourself said, and just how blind they seemed to be to how this would would look.
The part I took issue with was your claim that, if someone doesn’t want to get shot, they shouldn’t trespass. It appears you have taken that part back. I hope we can agree that trespass is not a crime that warrants being killed over.
Unfortunately, I think it will only discourage them from sharing the video of their crimes with the public.
If there were no video, and they had spent 30 seconds getting their story straight, they’d be lauded as heroes by the same who hold Zimmerman and Rittenhouse as good people just lookin’ out for their neighborhoods.
No, actually I don’t take that back. Getting shot is a very obvious potential consequence of trespassing. If I were wandering around on somebody else’s property, I would absolutely expect a good chance of the property owner shooting first and asking questions later. I know some people here seem to be of the opinion that private construction sites have a revolving door and concession stand for random looky-loos, but I still think you should stay the hell off other people’s property without a really good reason. I always have.
I agree. The neighbor was apparently mildly worried about liability of someone on his construction site. They tried to run over a guy, then brandished a gun at him. That’s not “good intentions”, that’s looking for an excuse to be an asshole. I don’t think they intended to kill him, I think they intended to scare the shit out of him, then turn him over to a “justice system” they hoped would do the same. They saw this as a chance to do something they wanted to do–be aggressive, violent assholes–with a veneer of justification. This wasn’t a selfless act gone wrong, like baking a cake and accidently poisoning someone.
I don’t think anyone came forward to be like, “Oh yeah, those guys. Super helpful. Always mowing their neighbor’s grass and helping people move.”’
Now, did they take this chance to be aggressive, violent assholes because they are always that way, or does violent, angry rage against black men fill them with special satisfaction? I guess we can’t know, but I suspect the latter.
No, and I never made that claim. (FWIW, BTW, I do not own and have never fired a gun, myself, and only once have I ever had to call the cops on a trespasser. Drunk guy at 4 AM with the wrong house who couldn’t be convinced of that. He got argumentative with the cop, got arrested.)
Do you think he should have put his hands up and thrown himself on the ground when confronted? Were his attempts to run away, and then defend himself, also “reckless and stupid”?
I thought even in Texas it is absolutely murder to blast a trespasser? Then again, I would not expect to be randomly mugged on a city street, but that has definitely happened to me, which goes to show you can never predict what a random psycho is going to do.
That’s complicated. If they had said why they were trying to stop him, hold him for the police to arrive because of his trespassing, he should have stopped and waited. But since they made no attempt to tell him what was going on I can understand his panic.
But really, all these questions imply that I have a lot more passion invested in this case than I actually have. It hasn’t actually occupied a great deal of my attention.