In a blog entry at My Brown Baby, Nick Chiles examines last month's shooting death of a Florida teen by the Neighborhood Watch captain in his family's neighborhood, saying that it could have been him or his 19-year-old son, who is frequently harassed by cops.
An African-American family in Florida is still trying to figure out why their 17-year-old son was shot dead by the Neighborhood Watch captain in their gated subdivision last month, after he walked to a local convenience store for a pack of Skittles for his little brother. For some outrageous reason the Neighborhood Watch captain, who called 911 to report a “suspicious” person in the neighborhood and then blasted a hole in the boy’s chest before the police could respond, still has not been arrested.
These kinds of stories cut me deeply because I see my own life, my own son, my own circumstances, all up in the details. This is the fear that every parent of a black boy lives with — a fear that grows every year as they age and begin to leave your house without you alongside them. We have to let them go at some point, but it’s so damn hard. And stories like this only make it harder.
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin (the angelic-faced boy in the picture above) lived in Miami with his mother, but he was visiting his father and stepmother in their gated subdivision in Sanford, a town about 20 miles north of Orlando. He was watching the NBA All-Star game when his 13-year-old brother asked Trayvon if he could get him a pack of Skittles at the store. That was the last time his family saw him alive.
Read Nick Chiles' entire blog entry at My Brown Baby.