#All Lives Matter
Aug. 29, Deputy Darren Goforth was filling his patrol car at a Chevron gas station in Cypress, Texas, when he was ambushed and gunned down from behind, execution style, one shot to the head. After he fell face down to the ground, his body was riddled with bullets.
The suspect, a black male, Shannon Miles, 30, was later arrested and charged with capital murder in the execution of Deputy Goforth.
The world and the community are shocked and outraged over this senseless and cruel killing of an innocent man who was just doing his job. He was probably targeted because he wore a police uniform, which was his only crime.
The outpouring of support for the officer and his family was immediate, with a walk of support, laying of flowers at the gas station where he was killed and more than $70,000 raised in less than two days.
Jan. 16, 2014, at a Northwest Houston strip center, 26-year-old Jordan Baker was riding his bike to the store when HPD Officer Juventino Castro, who at the time was working as a security guard, stopped Baker because he fit the description of a robbery suspect: a black male wearing a hoodie. Baker was not the perpetrator and was unarmed when confronted by the officer.
Baker, a community college student and father of a 7-year-old son, was shot and killed by Castro in an alley scattered with trash behind the strip center.
His only crime: being black and wearing a hoodie.
Two lives were snatched in an instant, senselessly.
As an African-American woman, I am among those outraged by the killing of Officer Goforth, but I am also incensed by the killing of Jordan Baker and so many other unarmed, innocent individuals.
The black community is enraged by the way some police officers have dealt with blacks, which also results in senseless killings. Can we truly say “All Lives Matter” when it boils down to whose life was taken?
Yes, it seems like rhetoric to some when the term “Black Lives Matter” is stressed, but it’s their way to get a point across. Now, when something such as this senseless killing of a white officer hits home, All Lives Matter?
Yes, all lives do matter. This cannot be stressed enough.
We should not wait until something such as a killing of an innocent person, whether it be a police officer, a regular citizen, an African American, a Caucasian, a Hispanic, an Asian or whomever, to determine that all lives matter. Ethnicity should never be a factor in the way a person is treated.
These senseless killings have got to STOP.
