I scrapped the original opening line of this article because I was going to list their names; those names that had simply become names because they were killed at the hands of systematic brutality. I was going to list them because the weight of their names was pressing against my chest and holding my lungs locked without breath. But then I realized they were not just names; these names had lives. So I wrote this instead:
Philando Castile was a man who lived very near to my hometown of Saint Paul, MN. So close that we shared a zip code together. I did not know this man and now I never will. He was shot. He was shot and bled out in his car in front of his girlfriend and daughter. I cannot think of a worse thing to see as a child, and that poor child saw it all. I cannot think of what kind of person would shoot a man during a simple traffic stop, let alone in front of his girlfriend, and especially his daughter.
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In the days following the night of July 6th, the weeks of protests in front of the governor's mansion, and the month-long DOJ investigation, uproar over Castile's death gradually settled into resentment with little substantive change brought forth. I drove past there on the 3rd of September about two months after Castile's death and saw a little shrine there at the gate. Remains of the outrage which shut down that entire portion of Summit Avenue for weeks and where the masses of people stomped out the grass. Soon after that, Castile became a mere statistic that you can look up yourself. I'm not going to give it to you. I dare you, research the number of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans that have died at the hands of the police meant to protect them, to serve them.
And cry. It's a sad story.
