Quoted:
I was watching WGN the other night and they were talking about 6 people that had been shot in one incident, with 1 person dead at the scene. Usual suspects, usual victims.
What I found interesting is that there hasn't been a national outrage over the incident and Al Sharpton never showed up.
Dwyane Wade - he of the hoodie-wearing, Twitter social statement - had a nephew who was shot in that incident:
Link.
"I played with a heavy heart," he said. "I played for him, with him in mind."
He stopped, paused, as a reporter tried to interject a basketball question.
As human as Wade and his teammates appeared in that team photo in hoodies a week ago, nothing is the same when it's family.
"You know," he said, "it's my nephew. I was 9 years old when he was born, so I was an uncle at 9 year old."
Again, he paused, this a postgame moment unlike any other for Wade.
"So a lot of thoughts go through your mind and just understanding that God is good and he has another chance," he said. "My prayers go out to all the families involved, especially the one family who lost a child. My prayers go out to them. It's tough."
But it's also tough when you refuse to turn your back on your community, continue to push for something better in your hometown through your Wade's World Foundation.
And then this.
"The thing I think about is kind of where the incident happened, with my nephew," he said. "I remember marching over there a couple of years ago for my foundation, with many kids in the community, to stop the violence.
"It continues to go."
Apparently the incident was drug related:
Link.
Police say the two gunmen entered the Bishop Golden Store in the the 1400 block of West 79th Street around 6 p.m. and opened fire, hitting six people inside the store between the ages of 16 and 24.
Shawndell Harris, of the 9600 block of South Perry Avenue, was killed, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.
Two others were taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center, two to Stroger Hospital and the fifth victim to Holy Cross Hospital, police said. Four of them were in critical condition as they were taken to the hospitals.
Community activist Andrew Holmes said he saw three of the victims outside the store after the shooting, one leaning against the wall, one sitting on the sidewalk and another on the curb. Two other men were inside, one of them dead.
"They were all hollering and yelling," he said.
Police say one of the shooters was armed with a TEC-9-type gun. The SUV was found abandoned near 76th Street and Ashland Avenue, police said. Detectives were reviewing surveillance video, but no one was reported in custody.
The motive for the shooting was unclear, but police said at least one of the six victims may have been selling drugs in or around the store earlier in the day.
The way many people in that community only take an interest in their kids after they come to some bad end - usually either murdered or murdering - never ceases to amaze me. It's almost like a racialist Munchhausen's Syndrome.
Guess what Dwyane - maybe that hoodie-wearing, thug-life wannabe culture you're so quick to lionize has something to do with this sort of thing?