What a senseless thing to have happen. I agree with Upthegrove - it really does stink to high heaven.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/us/30lima.html
Police Shooting of Mother and Infant Exposes a City’s Racial Tension
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG January 30, 2008 New York Times
LIMA, Ohio — The air of Southside is foul-smelling and thick, filled with fumes from an oil refinery and diesel smoke from a train yard, with talk of riot and recrimination, and with angry questions: Why is Tarika Wilson dead? Why did the police shoot her baby?
“This thing just stinks to high heaven, and the police know it,” said Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “We’re not asking for answers anymore. We’re demanding them.”
Some facts are known. A SWAT team arrived at Ms. Wilson’s rented house in the Southside neighborhood early in the evening of Jan. 4 to arrest her companion, Anthony Terry, on suspicion of drug dealing, said Greg Garlock, Lima’s police chief. Officers bashed in the front door and entered with guns drawn, said neighbors who saw the raid.
Moments later, the police opened fire, killing Ms. Wilson, 26, and wounding her 14-month-old son, Sincere, Chief Garlock said. One officer involved in the raid, Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, a 31-year veteran, has been placed on paid administrative leave.
Beyond these scant certainties, there is mostly rumor and rage. The police refuse to give any account of the raid, pending an investigation by the Ohio attorney general.
Ivory Austin (center), Tarika’s brother, in the march to protest this police murder.
Black people in Lima, from the poorest citizens to religious and business leaders, complain that rogue police officers regularly stop them without cause, point guns in their faces, curse them and physically abuse them. They say the shooting of Ms. Wilson is only the latest example of a long-running pattern of a few white police officers treating African-Americans as people to be feared.
“There is an evil in this town,” said C. M. Manley, 68, pastor of New Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. “The police harass me. They harass my family. But they know that if something happens to me, people will burn down this town.”
Internal investigations have uncovered no evidence of police misconduct, Chief Garlock said. Still, local officials recognize that the perception of systemic racism has opened a wide chasm.
“The situation is very tense,” Mayor David J. Berger said. “Serious threats have been made. People are starting to carry weapons to protect themselves.”
Surrounded by farm country known for its German Catholic roots and conservative politics, Lima is the only city in the immediate area with a significant African-American population. Black families, including Mr. Manley’s, came to Lima in the 1940s and ’50s for jobs at what is now the Husky Energy Lima Refinery and other factories along the city’s southern border. Blacks make up 27 percent of the city’s 38,000 people, Mr. Berger said.
Many blacks still live downwind from the refinery. Many whites on the police force commute from nearby farm towns, where a black face is about as common as a twisty road. Of Lima’s 77 police officers, two are African-American.
“If I have any frustration when I retire, it’ll be that I wasn’t able to bring more racial balance to the police force,” said Chief Garlock, who joined the force in 1971 and has been chief for 11 years.
Tarika Wilson had six children, ages 8 to 1. They were fathered by five men, all of whom dealt drugs, said Darla Jennings, Ms. Wilson’s mother. But Ms. Wilson never took drugs nor allowed them to be sold from her house, said Tania Wilson, her sister.
“She took great care of those kids, without much help from the fathers, and the community respected her for that,” said Ms. Wilson’s uncle, John Austin.
Tarika Wilson’s companion, Mr. Terry, was the subject of a long-term drug investigation, Chief Garlock said, but Ms. Wilson was never a suspect.
During the raid, Ms. Wilson’s youngest son, Sincere, was shot in the left shoulder and hand. Three weeks after the shooting, he remains in fair condition, said a spokeswoman at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
Within minutes of the shooting, at around 8 p.m., 50 people gathered outside Ms. Wilson’s home and shouted obscenities at the police, neighbors said. The next day, 300 people gathered at the house and marched two miles to City Hall.
Many protesters believe they saw snipers atop police headquarters. The men on the roof were actually photographers, Chief Garlock said.
Sign on the door the police shattered as they rushed in and shot Tarika Wilson
“The police can say whatever they want,” Tania Wilson said. “Even before they shot my sister, I didn’t trust them.”
Smaller marches have continued every week since the shooting. The N.A.A.C.P. will hold a public meeting on Saturday to air complaints about police brutality. The group will soon request that the Department of Justice investigate the police department and the Allen County prosecutor’s office, Mr. Upthegrove said.
Junior Cook was a neighbor of Tarika Wilson. He says that he watched from his front porch as the SWAT team raced across his front yard, and that seconds later he watched a police officer run from Ms. Wilson’s house carrying a bleeding baby in a blanket.
“The cops in Lima, they is racist like no tomorrow,” said Mr. Cook, 56. “Why else would you shoot a mother with a baby in her arms?”
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ReplyDeleteCry me a river. I may come down and hand out KKK fliers this Friday.
ReplyDeleteBill White keeps coming up with a new lie on why over throw.com isn't back yet. The truth is, he's broke.
ReplyDeleteHow many of you ara people will be in Lima this weekend? I have 500 klan fliers ready to go for this weekend.
ReplyDeletei will be down there in full uniform
ReplyDeleteNobody should protest this. If the cops shot one of their babies, then let them raise hell about it. Its people like the anti-white racists here who think this is all a "black=good, white=bad" thing. A baby got shot because 1. a SWAT team was used on a house where there were known to be children and 2. because some woman decided to have drugs around her kids. At the same time, nowhere in this is it the babies fault. The cops were wrong and people deserve to be angry about it.
ReplyDeleteThe cops aren't on our side anyway, folks. Remember a little place called Ruby Ridge? It doesn't make it right just because its happening to muds. We're no better than the anti-white crowd if all of a sudden we side with the cops because they hurt blacks.
I wouldn't dream of standing with the blacks against the cops. Its none of my (our) business. If they raise hell at the police station and burn down a federal building, so be it. Maybe they can get away with it and either way, more power to them. As long as they keep the working class white community out of it, we're cool.
Like I said people, wrong is wrong. Unlike the antis, we don't stick up for something that is morally wrong. Non-whites, jews and self-hating whites will defend criminals of every shade but white, no matter what they've done. It can be murder, rape, torture or all three. We're different. What we lack in reasources has to be made up in honor and will power. Nobody go within 10 feet of this thing. Let their community sort it out for themselves.
However, if they come after our people because the iron boot coming down was connected to our same face, we'll be there in force.
I agree with you in one area, Chris. This was wrong and the "rightness" or the "wrongness" has nothing to do with race. There should not have been drugs in a house where children were present, of course. But the fact remains a woman is dead and a baby was shot...any way you look at it the shooting of these people was uncalled for.
ReplyDeleteJust what would you accomplish by handing out "klan fliers?" All you would do would demonstrate your ignorance and further augment the negative opinion that people already have of you.
I'd like to think there are no Jerry-Springer style Klansmen out there ready to lend more to the jewish potrait of American Nationalists. Probably there is but if there is no money involved like thier is pimping out their culture Indian style, I doubt they'll show.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I thought about was that everyone needs to wait until the whole story comes out on this before they get too upset with the cops. We've heard stories from all here to Africa about black females (and males on occasion) shooting from behind the cover of an infant. I have a feeling though that if that was the case, the cops would have said that already.
I'm a funny animal when it comes to drugs too. I hate drugs---I absolutely hate them and all things surrounding them. I've lost too many people in my life who have traded in my friendship for a lifestyle of being a doped up party-zombie. Never trust a man that shoves more than a finger up his nose and never, ever consider him a friend. Ironically, I think drugs ought to be legal. You make it where people can safely buy the over-taxed versions of street drugs at a drugstore, away goes the street pusher and the crimes that follow him. This would put a lot more blacks as being dependant on government assistance but it would also empty out the prisons. Take everybody who is in prison for a non-violent drug crime and let them go. Then of coarse, the companies that manufacture that shit will have to make the product safer and less addictive. You won't have a nation full of drug addicts anymore than you have a nation full of drunks now. You make laws to regulate when and where and all that and there's another source of public income besides the taxes: fines.
I'm not some big supporter of making drugs legal. I don't go out and say that its a cause of mine but rather a good idea in place of another good but failed idea. In the meantime, while drugs are legalized and Pedro the Pot Pusher is forced to now push a lawn mover instead of his wares, you work on the drug laws. LOTS of laws that allow government intrusion into people's lives are in place because of the "war on drugs." Sounds like the "war on terror", huh? The way to stop the drug culture is to de-criminalize it. You'll still have drug addicts like you've still got drunks today. You've got no shortage of rehabs for either.
Anyhow, that being said, you legalize thier illegal business, then the mama and her companion would be slightly more likely to be at work rather than at home sitting on their stash. The likelyhood of a SWAT team kicking their door in drops to zero. I'm racists as they get but I know who is on my side just as clearly as who isn't. Cops kicking in people's doors are no one's friend, people.
Think about that next time you applaud them raiding one of our homes for just being politically incorrect.
Chris, you still doing Elisha? We are not standing with the cops. We are letting the blacks know, shut up. One less drug addict black welfare mom. however, good work cop who shot her.
ReplyDeleteI could honestly care less about the drug dealing mama that got killed. You run that kind of game, you take the risk. Her getting shot probably halted production of a negro baby factory of the worst kind. What I'm saying is that kicking a door in and shooting a baby is not right. I don't care why kicked the door in and who the mama was---if you are a cop, not a soldier, its not right at all, hands down. The niggers in that community have every right to be upset about it. If they knew so much as to suspect them of selling drugs, then they must have knew there were kids there.
ReplyDeleteNow stow that heavy-metal-Swaztica-scrawled-on-the-back-of-the-GED-study-guide and think about this for a minute. I'm not upset but I'm saying for once they have a right to be angry. If we start looking at things from some child-like angle of "them-bad, us-good period" then we're just as bad as any ARA rich kid. I'd stay away from this issue. Cops normally would feel just as ok putting a bullet through the head of one of our kids should the feds send them down for a visit. Let the blacks and the cops fight it out. Remember, these are the same guys who sit through hours of ADL enforced training on how to take care of upity white people.
All of this is just ANOTHER big blaring example of why multi-racial society doesn't work. Either somebody gets shipped off, breed out or killed off before there is going to be peace---which would you rather it be, Nikki?
Well Chris, I don't believe that a multi-racial society doesn't work. However, given the hypothetical, and if those are the only 3 choices I have, I would choose the first. As a matter of fact I might even contribute to the purchase of an island for you guys just to be able to sit back and watch how white supremacists get along...and how long it takes before you start beating each other to death.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the shooting goes, I agree that I would like to know more about this issue. But as you said, Chris, they had to have known their were children in the house. I just have this picture of them busting through the door and shooting at the first thing that moved. That's bullshit.
Kind of like Ruby Ridge except at a crackhouse, right?
ReplyDeleteI wish I would have said that. Exactly, Chris.
ReplyDeleteOk, so now you are saying Ruby Ridge, though it happened to white people, was wrong? You do know the Vickey and Sam Weaver were white, right?
ReplyDeleteOf course, I know they were white. That doesn't make what happened there any more right or wrong. It was a travesty and, I believe, totally avoidable.
ReplyDeleteWhoa! You just committed anti-white heresy (sp?). Clean out any unwanted emails and get ready! White people victimized and maybe even in the right???
ReplyDeleteLOL! You can make me laugh! You would probably be amazed at some of the things that we agree on.
ReplyDeleteYep. Agreed that Ruby Ridge was a bloodbath in which innocents were needlessly killed.
ReplyDeleteThe Lima case also seems to be one in which excessive, deadly force was used, especially given the relatively low level of narcotics activity involved and the lack of violence in the history of the alleged dealer. While I understand the dynamics of a drug raid, my personal observation is that they sent an army to take down a small-time dealer.
Also, when the police know in advance that children are in the home, I think that this knowledge necessitates that they approach the scene in something less than full battle mode.