NEWARK
Cory Booker seemed tired, beleaguered, bewildered.
The young mayor had been on the run with very little sleep for several days. Now, during a break in a private room at City Hall here, he leaned forward in his chair and said, “There is something going on in our country that people are not, for some reason, awake to.”
He then mentioned what he described as a “poignant” meeting he’d had with a top official of the F.B.I. “I asked him, ‘What is the solution to this problem?’ ” said Mr. Booker. “And he said to me, ‘It’s not law enforcement.’ ”
The mayor was talking about the violent crime that, like a dragon from some Medieval fairy tale, continues to devour the lives of young Americans, especially those in poor black and brown neighborhoods. This is a tale with no happy ending in sight.
Newark has been convulsed since last weekend when the dragons materialized late at night in the rundown playground behind a public school. A 19-year-old college student, Natasha Aeriel, was gravely wounded by a gunshot to the head. Her three companions, including her 18-year-old brother, Terrance, were then marched at gunpoint down a flight of stone steps and ordered to face a 6-foot-high concrete wall.
The youngsters were told to kneel and then were executed with shots to the back of the head in a tableau that seemed too insane to be real. Staring at the wall in daylight, under an extremely hot August sun, I found myself resisting the idea that this really happened, that three young people really died right there, like casualties in a war zone........
http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/08/bob-herbert-bloodbath-in-newark-and.html
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