The woman, Ernie Orsborn, became angry over fireworks going off in her neighborhood while her two young children were trying to sleep. Records show repeated calls to 311 reporting the firework violators between 8:30p.m. and 1 a.m. (snip)

Witnesses tell us that sometime around 1:30 a.m. she decided to take measures into her own hands.

“I heard her yell, you want to see fireworks, here you go assholes,” a neighbor tells us. “Suddenly I see her holding a diaper bin and a lighter. She started pulling them out one by one and lobbing them over the fence at a group of drunk men shooting bottle rockets at each other. I sort of wanted to go help her throw them.” (snip)

He wanted to be an engineer, the stories report. He was taking flying lessons. He got A’s and B’s and was majoring, said his teacher, in cheerfulness.

Tom Wolfe, more cynical than I, notes in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” that every kid who dies unjustly and too early retroactively transforms into an honor student with presidential aspirations. This is not quite fair to their memory either, but it is the debt we owe the dead.

Dead children, dead kids, often carry with them the burden of our outsize hopes. “He could have been president,” one commentator noted. He could have been an astronaut. Hope can cast shadows as massive and false as those cast by fear.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/the-scariest-thing-about-trayvon-martin/2012/03/20/gIQAfKlLSS_blog.html The scariest thing about Trayvon Martin

By Alexandra Petri