Oct 15, 2019
Atatiana Jefferson is 28-year-old black woman with a degree in Biology. She has just completed Pre-Med and is currently waiting to attend Medical School. She was not a welfare queen, drug addict, or an angry, useless black woman by any means. She was intelligent, ambitious, and productive to her society. She had just moved into her sick mother’s home a few months ago, to look after her, as she awaits her opportunity to star Med School.
On Saturday night, she was in the living room playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew, with the front door of her house wide open to allow the breeze to flow through. The Screen to the front door remained locked, for obvious reasons. Such a common habit for many home owners during the hot weather.
The next-door neighbor woke up at 2:30am and noticed the door in Tatiana’s house was wide open. He immediately called the police using the non-emergency 311 line, to ask for a safety check at Atatiana’s home. What he didn’t know, was that his phone call would turn out to be the end to a precious life. Sure enough, a white police officer showed up in less than 3 minutes. A released video from his body camera showed him going straight up to the front open door, looking at it, and then walking off around to the back of the house. Through the bedroom window, he saw Atatiana and her little nephew playing video games. Without even identifying himself, he yelled, "Put your hands up! Show me your hands". Procedure dictates that any officer conducting a search or investigating any case has to identify himself as a police officer before interacting with a suspect or anyone in the case. This is not what happened. Atatiana got up, and the cop opened fire through the window and fatally shot her. That was it – another innocent black child & soul lost.
This story sounds like fiction, and I wish it were, but unfortunately, it’s not, it’s a true story. It’s neither some real well thought of script written by some Hollywood director, nor is it a fairytale told by folks to scare other people. It happened on Saturday in Fort Worth, Texas. This is the reality of a life of a black person living in White America in the 21st Century.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the Fort Worth police department was hesitant to turn on one of their own. They tried to cover up the story as fast as they could, as it often happens in many other incidents of white cops shooting an unarmed black man. Their initial reaction was to tell the public that they had found a gun inside Atatiana house. Well, this is Texas, a state with open-carry gun laws, where almost every house owns firearm – what would you expect? And as the news broke, the police came into the realization that Atatiana was not your typical drug addicted black woman. As the pressure built up and the story made national news, they run out of excuses. Still instead of firing the police officer, they went ahead and afforded him the luxury to resign. Are you serious? If this was a black cop, shooting a white kid – would they give him time to resign? History has shown that the easy answer is a hard NO.
Eventually, they finally arrested their own, just to shortly release him on bail. This whole case and scenario come right off the back of yet another white cop killing black person case, where, again in the same state of Texas, less than two weeks ago, a white police officer was convicted and sent to jail for the murder of an unarmed black man. In her case, after getting off work, she mistakenly entered into the wrong person’s apartment thinking it was hers. Finding a black guy inside, she immediately drew her duty weapon and killed the guy. She later claimed that after working too many overtime shifts, she couldn’t think straight.
These cases have polarized our societies all across America. There’s too many a case where white cops are trigger happy when it comes to the black community and to their benefit, the system has always found ways to give excuses for them; starting from self-defense to accusations of the black community being full of gangsters and thugs. In this specific case, it was just an ordinary girl with aspirations just like your daughters, nieces, aunties, wives and mothers would have.
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