The original draft of this email follows up yesterday’s email to mostly the same Washington Post and Columbus Dispatch reporters who insist on further dividing our nation along racial lines by clouding the facts that plainly justified the recent Columbus, Ohio, police shooting of a fatherless, knife-wielding teenager who seemed tragically incapable of self-control. The Post’s David Fahrenthold contributed to today’s front page story and was thus added to the list of addressees. The cowardly mayor of Columbus and the equally cowardly governor of Ohio were among several officials and staff copied again today.
Dear Randy, Paulina, David and Derek,
In a more innocent time, like that depicted in the Tony Award-winning “West Side Story,” warring juveniles caught up in a rumble didn’t keep fighting, kicking and stabbing when Officer Krupke’s patrol car pulled up [“Family describes Ma’Khia Bryant as loving. affectionate,” A12, Apr. 23]. They had enough sense to scatter and flee.
Yet even as Columbus Police Officer Nicholas Reardon got out of his vehicle and commanded her to stop, video footage shows that the supposedly “loving and affectionate” Ma’Khia Bryant — all 200 enraged pounds of her — kept kicking and swinging her 7- to 8-inch knife or, as you apologetic propagandists put it, “what appear[ed] to be a blade briefly visible in her hand.”
Folks of all ages who don’t have enough sense to drop the weapon and cease and desist from violence when Five-0 rolls up pose a clear and present danger to society, regardless of how many bubbly make-over videos they’ve posted on Tik-Tok.
The obvious problem with far too many minority kids is the chaos and lawlessness they experience as a direct result of the systemic fatherlessness into which they’re born and raised. This chaotic insecurity festers in their pyches and souls like time-bombs, waiting to explode without warning and leaving the rest of us to cope with the tragic consequences.
And only when our media, cowardly politicians (yes, I’m talking to you @GovMikeDeWine and @MayorGinther), civic groups, clergy and businesses focus as they must on dramatically reducing the catastrophically self-dooming out-of-wedlock birthrates in black and brown communities can we hope for better, less violent outcomes. So please start speaking this incontrovertible truth. You have no credibility otherwise.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.