If you still haven’t read this interesting, well-researched article on the murderer of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, I highly recommend. The following part of the article stood out to me (emphasis mine):
“I can’t even understand why,” Althea Hood, who had been a close friend of Mr. Brinsley since 2006 and saw him in Atlanta in early December at a recording studio, said of his death. “Other than, what he did in the beginning with his girlfriend might have been a mistake, and then he lost it.”
Some people are just irredeemable, in my view. “What he did”? “Might have been a mistake”? “A mistake”?” He shot her, you stupid fuck. That’s “what he did.” At least, have the decency to name the crime you are dismissing so flippantly.
The ending of the article is very significant:
“I was shaking,” [the murderer’s mother] said. “I said, ‘Jalaa, I don’t like the feel of this.’ We were both shaking. I had a feeling he was heading this way.”
She thought he was coming for her. Instead, he came for two police officers he had never met.
The guy spent his entire life trying to murder his abusive parents. The patriarchal prohibitions were too strong, so he kept lashing out at substitute figures.
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