A Little Girl’s Death in Atlanta
Will the untimely death of an eight-year-old shake the BLM movement to its senses?
Perhaps never before have the perverse priorities of the Black Lives Matter movement been so thoroughly exposed as they were this weekend in Atlanta with the tragic death of an eight-year-old girl.
That little girl, Secoriea Turner, was fatally shot near the spot where Rayshard Brooks was killed last month by Atlanta police, but the two deaths could hardly be more dissimilar. Brooks, a 27-year-old with a history of violence, resisted arrest, punched a police officer in the face, grabbed that officer’s taser, and fired it at the officer while attempting to flee. Secoriea Turner, who was killed near the charred remains of the Wendy’s restaurant and parking lot where Brooks was killed, was an innocent black child with a lifetime ahead of her.
Maybe this can be a tipping point, a breaking away from the self-destructive demonization of cops to a sober assessment of the real issue plaguing black communities across our country: black-on-black crime.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms finally seems to think it’s time. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, “‘Enough is enough,’ Bottoms said in an emotional press conference at Atlanta police headquarters in which the mayor and family of Secoriea Turner urged people to come forward with information about Secoriea’s killers. ‘I am just asking you to please honor this baby’s life,’ Bottoms said. ‘Please, if you know who did this, please turn them in. These people are a danger to all of us.’”
Mayor Bottoms, surrounded by the little girl’s mother and other family members, blamed her death on the vaguest of assailants: “armed individuals.” Black Lives Matter protesters have staked out their ground near that Wendy’s restaurant, congregating there in the weeks since Brooks’s death.
One wonders how Secoriea’s death will affect the hearts and minds of those protestors.
“[She] just wanted to get home to see her cousins,” said Secoriea’s father, before stating the cold hard truth about his daughter’s death: “The say black lives matter. You killed one of your own.”
As for the future of Black Lives Matter, Bottoms isn’t ready to call the organization out for its misplaced focus — a focus on the two-tenths of one percent of the nation’s 7,300 black homicide victims in 2019 — the 14 unarmed black men who were shot and killed by police in 2019. But she did make a point to say who wasn’t at fault. “That’s an important movement that’s happening,” she said, referring to BLM. “But this random wild, wild west shoot ‘em up because you can, it has got to stop. It has to stop. You can’t blame this on a police officer.”
“This is some people carrying some weapons who shot up a car with an eight-year-old baby in the car,” said the mayor. “For what?”