Jack of Harts

I have sympathy for the woman who died in Minneapolis. She was a little girl once, and her parents wanted her to grow up to be a functional adult to raise children of her own one day.

Now her children don’t have a Mom anymore.

Now an officer has to live with the knowledge that he shot and killed someone. The fact that he was defending his life doesn’t make things much better for him. The knowledge that you shot someone is always a hard thing to deal with. It’s why most departments have mandatory downtime for officers involved in an officer-involved shooting. Even if you were one hundred percent in the right, it takes a toll on a functional person to kill someone. And it should. We should never feel good about killing people.

We shouldn’t celebrate death. We shouldn’t laugh at it. And I don’t celebrate this woman’s death.

She was a little girl once, full of promise and dreams and the wishes to do great things. I mourn for that girl. Someone filled her with lies and twisted her into the kind of person who thought it was totally okay to go out and lead a group of people devoted to interfering with a law enforcement agency rounding up illegal aliens. She used her vehicle as a weapon to stop them, and when officers demanded that she stop, that she get out of the vehicle, she backed away from them instead. And when they surrounded her in an attempt to arrest her, she hit the gas and hit one of them.

And that was that. Three quick shots from the officer she hit. A single threat response series of trigger pulls. The classic one-two-three trained into professional trigger-pullers all over the place. The automatic defensive reaction of someone trying to stop another human being from killing them or other people. He shot her through the windshield, but she had her foot on the gas so hard that the vehicle continued to accelerate away until she crashed into the other side of the road several car-lengths away. And in that much time, those handful of seconds, a human being died.

Because she thought it was a good thing to lead a group of people devoted to protecting illegal aliens from deportation and that it was a good thing to use her vehicle as a weapon to attack officers who were deporting illegal aliens.

I grieve for the little girl she used to be. I grieve for her family. I grieve for her children. I even grieve for the woman herself. And I have sympathy for her. She was doing what she thought was right.

But the people who taught her that? The people who filled her full of lies? The people who turned that little girl into the woman who could try to kill someone who was only trying to arrest her? I want them found and brought to justice, because they destroyed that little girl and their actions resulted in the death of a human being. They killed that little girl back then, and now they have killed that woman.

I have no sympathy for them, I hope we find out who did it, and I hope they go to prison for what they did to her.