A TALE OF TWO CRASHES

Heather Heyer, Slaughtered Innocent

My sorrow and anger for the monstrosity of what has been allowed to happen in Charlottesville...no words. 

But check this.

First, Taylor Lorenz, a reporter for The Hill, discovered this reality at the police station: "Every witness here claims the act was deliberate." This stands in stark contrast to "..several police officers at the station here think the guy running people down wasn't malicious. They said the driver was scared." 

The reporter discovered that those officers hadn't been on the scene or even viewed the videos of the attack. 

Setting aside the accounts of how the authorities stood aside and let this situation spin out of control, isn't it troubling that these officers reflexively minimize the assailant's actions? It seems incredible that they wouldn't just say that they were waiting to gather more information. Instead, they offered their opinions in the absence of evidence. Their ill-informed opinions differed from what came forward at the official press conference  where the police chief announced that this was no accident - it was premeditated.

Also note the coverage of the (take your pick) murderer/terrorist/hate crime perpetrator/Nazi. He is humanized into a sympathetic figure with stories of his upbringing. Oh the adversity this "quiet little boy" suffered! 

Now, keep all this in mind as we step back in time to compare this to the deaths at SXSW in 2014. Remember how a driver crashed his car into a crowd, too? How was this reported?

The assailant, a young "aspiring rapper," panicked when police tried to pull him over. He sped off through barricades and into the crowd gathered for the festivities. Check Heavy.com's report on his background, "Top Ten Facts You Need to Know." No details of growing up in adversity - in fact, no details about his childhood at all. Instead, we get an utterly unsympathetic portrait. 

Compare this to the same site's coverage of the Charlottesville killer, "Five Fast Facts You Need to Know". Notice any difference? 

While held in a police cruiser at the scene of the crime, the SXSW killer cried to an officer "Sir, all I care about is me not killing nobody. I didn't mean to hurt nobody. I was just scared. I didn't mean to."

Maybe those officers in Charlottesville raising unsubstantiated doubts about the premeditated killing on their beat could have spoken sympathetic words for the SXSW killer, too. Oh, but I forgot to mention an important detail - the murderer in Charlotte was white, and the SXSW? Do I even have to say it?  

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