Marabelle wrote:What's sad to me is that a young man died on his way home after buying Skittles and something to drank. It's not white or black. It's someone being followed because he looked suspicious to a man who had dreams of being a police man and felt he should keep an eye on a teenager who was walking down the street. The young man didn't provoke him. He was on the phone walking home. He just felt uneasy because a "creepy" man was following him. Murder? Manslaughter? A man died on his way home after buying Skittles. If that was your brother, son, father, uncle, cousin or friend wouldn't you want the person who killed him to be punished? Who provoke who? Who followed who? One person had a gun and the other had a bag of Skittles.
This was sad too. Newlywed walking home and savagely beaten and killed by 4 people. Why was this not national news? Notice the ages of the assailants. Ironically one named Trayvon.
http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0608web/sowers.htmlZach Sowers walked the 10 blocks home alone. As he did, four teenagers — Trayvon Ramos and Eric Price, 16; Arthur Jeter Jr., 17; and Wilburt Martin, 19 — parked a borrowed Dodge Stratus two blocks up the street from the Sowerses' rowhouse. "We went out to rob somebody," Price later told police. When Ramos saw Zach walking up the street, he said, "Like him right there," Price recalled.
Ramos and Price got out and walked toward Zach, while Jeter and Martin waited in the car. When Zach reached his front steps, Ramos, who outweighed Zach by 90 pounds, applied his heft and his fist to knock Zach out, Price said. Ramos then used the fender of a Nissan Sentra parked outside the house as leverage, leaning on it with his right hand as he repeatedly slammed his foot against the back of Zach's head, which lay between the car and the curb. When police arrived, they thought the man lying facedown in the gutter, a flung flip-flop a few feet south of him, might be drunk. A flashlight search discovered his head was bloodied — the first sign of the long struggle his brain and body would eventually lose.
After brutalizing Zach; stealing his watch, cell phone, and wallet; and using his credit card to buy cigars, food, and gasoline, the quartet went on a weeklong crime spree, robbing Martin's next-door neighbor of $300 at gunpoint and pistol-whipping a tattoo artist hired by Martin. By the end of the week, detectives in Baltimore County had tracked down the car (seen in gas station videotapes) to a rundown suburban apartment complex, where they found Zach's watch and wallet, along with a backpack of tattoo equipment.
City police brought each of the defendants in for questioning. "Some were remorseful, but others had no emotion at all," says city robbery detective Phil Lassahn, one of several cops who cracked the case. Ramos laughed upon hearing Martin's first name and denied any involvement in the beating or knowledge of the other suspects. Earlier, in an interview room, Lassahn had shown the other three suspects pictures of Zach Sowers' bloodied, swollen head. They confessed to being there, adding that Ramos had done the beating, which Price labeled a "scraping." Price was the first to finger Ramos: "He just got a problem," he told Lassahn. "He's violent."
If what happened to Zach Sowers wasn't so horrific and real, it would qualify as an urban cliché, a cautionary tale from the gentrification file. The victim is white; the assailants, black. The Sowerses were newcomers, former suburbanites who chose to live in an up-and-coming city neighborhood. The young men were residents of the other Baltimore, the one only blocks away but worlds apart from the rehabs and roof decks that limn the city's newly affluent quarters. Little wonder, then, that in the public square, the tragedy for the young couple came to represent far more than just another crime in a city that is full of them. In newspaper columns, blogs, radio shows, and Web sites, hundreds of angry and petrified commentators took an abiding interest in Anna and Zach's plight — interest that dwarfed any mention of the human facts behind perhaps any other recent individual homicide in the city.
