The recent cold-blooded killing of retired, former police officer Larry Neuman is not a case of Black folks’ “chickens coming home to roost.”
Rather it is a sad commentary that our chickens are already home and roosting quite well.
The two alleged killers are Lazarius Watts, 16, and Marquan Jones, 17. Those are the ages when children should be slowly developing into adults. They should be looking forward to graduating high school and going to prom. Instead, if these two are found guilty, they can expect to be spending the rest of their lives in prison.
Sadly, the Under-18-Killer-Club has a lot of members. The individual who allegedly shot and killed 7-year-old Jai’mani Rivera, as he stood outside his house near Jackson and Oakley, is 16. We can go back 30 years to 1994 when Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, 11, was killed by the 16- and 14-year-old Hardaway brothers. Underage killers have been in our faces repeatedly. Society and the Black community’s response has been mostly hand-wringing. Too often, Black society and politicians have put the focus on external reasons and not done anything to dive head first into the true internal reasons for this behavior. Criminal culture is winning when heinous killers are now in their mid-teens.
News reports have told us that 16-year-old Lazarius Watts is currently in home confinement. If Cook County Jail had an inmate that got out and killed somebody, the lawyers and everyone else would be demanding accountability. Lawsuits would be filed for millions of dollars. Where is the demand for the accountability of those who agreed to home confinement for this 16-year-old? Will there be a civil lawsuit to financially hold the responsible party accountable?
Also were those two boys just out wandering the streets that morning looking to rob just anybody? Or was Neuman targeted? Addresses for the two alleged offenders are not given, so I wonder exactly how close they lived to the victim.
Almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century, we are producing killers like these young people at an alarming rate. Something must be done about it. For example, El Salvador was once the most dangerous country in Latin America. Within two years, their president solved the problem.
Does the Black community and our society have the will power to do the same?