A Different Kind of Evil

Who would gun down a child? That’s the question that Im asking myself this week, along with all of Boston. Of course I’m speaking about the shooting in Mattapan last week that left three people dead, including a 2-year-old child, and one person clinging to life in a Boston hospital.

The details are in itself horrid, but the killing of little Amani Smith while wrapped in his mother’s arms is hard to get your head around. What kind of human being would want to harm an innocent child, much less kill them? When I was a so-called street thug, there were rules. Women and children were off limits, they had nothing to do with whoever we were beefing with. If you broke those rules, you may get broken yourself. I’m not trying to glorify those days, I’m just saying there were rules.

Apparently, this new generation of, whatever they call themselves these days, have no rules and not much of anything else that I can see. There just seems to be this attitude of doing what you have to do and if anyone including babies, gets in the way….OH WELL. Maybe now people will wake up, especially the people that live in those neighborhoods and are held hostage in their own homes, afraid to walk to the corner store for a quart of milk. Maybe now the rest of the national media will catch up with the rest of us, and not just when a black man is arrested by a white cop.

But now I’m starting to rant. Seriously, what level of evil do the people who committed this crime come from? Could their lives have been so bad that they would need to gun down four people including a 2-year-old? Anyone capable of a crime such as this one is in a word, soulless. They are a different kind of evil, the type of person that feels nothing, or so they claim because when they catch the people behind this they will hide their face’s in the courtroom. They’ll request protective custody in jail, and of course they’ll get it along with three hots and a cot. Somewhere along the way they’ll get Justice, Well the state’s brand of justice anyway.

Am I advocating for them to get the death penalty? Never, that’s a coward’s way out. Remember what I said earlier in this column about rules. On one of my favorite police shows theirs a moment in the end where the suspect who is guilty of a crime smugly admits he’s guilty of a crime and the cops can’t touch him. So they let him go, they even give him a ride back to the neighborhood where he lives and drop him off. Then, slowly you see other street thugs come out of the neighborhood. Once the coward sees that this isn’t a welcome home party he screams to the police that they can’t leave him here, and they replay “Yes we can” then they drive off. The other street thugs move in and the screen fades to black. Now that’s justice, or is it evil? You tell me.

As for the victims’ families, I’m not going to sit here and pretend to know what they’re feeling. Yes, I lost a child, and I have lost close family members, but not to something like this, and I’m not going to tell them that their pain will lessen and they will learn how to deal with it, or that any kind of justice, street or otherwise, will make them feel better. It won’t. But what I will tell them is to take their pain and make it something positive, because to fight evil such as this it will require a strong sprit That will not make you feel better, but for each life that is saved it makes them stronger.