Held to answer

A man hears a noise in his yard, grabs a rifle, steps outside and sees someone running away in the dark. The man fires four times and kills 19-year-old Daniel Moore.

You’ve never heard of Daniel Moore. He was white.

He was walking home from a friend’s house one evening where he had been playing video games. It was a working-class neighborhood in San Bernardino, Calif., a place teeming with diversity – including black and Hispanic gangs.

The man with the rifle, who was Hispanic, had been providing information to the police about gang activity. When he raised his rifle, he thought he was protecting his family from gangs.

Daniel was not in a gang. He was just walking home, kind of like Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old black youth who was shot in Florida last month while walking back to a friend’s house after going to the store.

Daniel was killed by a man who was afraid.  Trayvon was killed by a man who was afraid. What were the two shooters afraid of? Criminals.

That is an understandable fear, especially if you’ve already been the victim of a crime. Yet race — not crime — has become the dominant issue in Trayvon Martin’s death with protests across the nation.

At a rally over the weekend in Portland, Ore., protesters called out, “No justice, no peace” as several speakers took turns stirring up the crowd with repeated references to racial injustice. One speaker even reached back to 1955 and invoked the memory of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth who was killed in Mississippi by two men who were tried and acquitted (but later readily talked about how they had killed him).

There were no rallies on behalf of Daniel Moore when he was killed in December 1993. His mother, Betty Moore, wanted to talk to the man who killed her son, but police wouldn’t even release his name.

“Did my son say anything before he died? Did he die right away?” she wanted to ask him. “Sometimes if you are dying you do say something.”

The man had not been arrested, and police reports are not always public record in California. All police would tell the mother was that her son apparently was being chased by someone when he ran into the man’s yard.

Betty Moore worked at Lighthouse for the Blind. She was not the kind of person to rally protesters and take to the streets.  But she couldn’t understand why the man didn’t stay inside his house and call police if he thought he was in danger.

She didn’t contact the local newspaper until her son had been dead more than a month, and it looked like the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office was going to rule the shooting justified. Even then, her story – “A Mother’s Lament” – did not make the front page.

The DA’s office cited state law, which allowed a person to kill in self-defense if the person believed he was in imminent danger. There need not be actual danger – only a perception of actual danger.

Eventually, the man was indicted on a lesser charge than murder and went to trial, where a jury acquitted him. Betty Moore was disappointed but grateful for the trial. Her son’s killer was forced to justify his actions. She took some consolation in knowing that a courtroom full of strangers had paid attention to her son’s death.

Jurors were sympathetic to both the mother and the man — a parent himself. Given events in the man’s life and neighborhood, jurors could see how he had reason to believe he was in imminent danger.

Trayvon’s supporters might ask how many other cases like Daniel Moore’s there are that they’ve never heard of. Instead, they have cheapened Trayvon’s death with empty, inappropriate symbols. In Florida, Miami-Dade Commissioners “honored” him by passing out Skittles.

In Portland (and elsewhere), protesters wore hoodies, which shows they really don’t get it.

Like it or not, fair or not: On some young men, and in some neighborhoods, hoodies are associated with gangs. Street gangs have killed more young men and destroyed more neighborhoods than armed and paranoid neighborhood watch volunteers like George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon.

According to a report in The Oregonian, Rev. LeRoy Haynes, of the Albina Ministerial Alliance told the Portland rally, “It’s up to the people who love justice, equity and freedom to say we’re not going to back down and accept racial discrimination and injustice.”

On that point, the reverend may have something in common with Zimmerman, who decided he wasn’t going to back down and accept injustice anymore, either. Based on statements from neighbors, he was frustrated with the increase in break-ins and thefts in what had once been a safe community.

“These assholes always get away,” he told a 911 operator.

According to a story in the Miami Herald, foreclosures forced owners to rent to “low-lifes and gangsters,” said Frank Taaffe, a former neighborhood block captain. He told the paper that he suspected Zimmerman got tired of thugs “and reached his breaking point.”

The next phase in this story will be politicians, academicians and various “experts” calling for an end to fear of crime. To this group, Public Enemy No. 1 is the news media for its crime coverage.

Telling people to stop fearing crime will not prevent their cars from being stolen or broken into or their bicycles spirited away. It will not protect their homes from being burglarized. It will not stop vandals from spray painting a neighborhood mural (and calling graffiti “art” doesn’t make it so).

Telling people to relax, that crime is going down, isn’t reassuring considering how high the crime rate has been in the past. Too many people know someone who’s been a victim – and there was no arrest, no prosecution.

Yes, Zimmerman should be held to answer for shooting Trayvon Martin. (And if Zimmerman had a criminal record and could not legally possess a gun, as some news stories have alleged, then he should be charged with a weapons violation, too.)

But if Zimmerman goes to trial, don’t take to the streets if his case ends in a hung jury. Out of 12 jurors, it wouldn’t be a shock if a few of them have felt fear of a suspected criminal.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

The Man With the Megaphone

Doing the Wrong Thing