Still listed in the books as a hate crime.
Just over a week ago, while distracted by a government in the throes of a partial shutdown, we were forced to confront an unthinkable tragedy in Houston, Texas. A sweet seven-year-old girl named Jazmine Barnes, along with her three sisters, had happily piled into the family car early one morning and set off on a coffee run with their mother, LaPorsha Washington, at around 6:50 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 30.
And then the unthinkable.
A vehicle pulls alongside Washington and someone opens fire. The car’s windows shatter, spraying glass all over the terrified occupants. Bullets pierce the mainframe. When the shooting stops, and the smoky haze clears just enough, Washington realizes she’s been hit by gunfire. But her immediate concern is the backseat. She quickly whips her head around to check on her babies. Her panicked eyes take in Jazmine’s lifeless form, crumpled in her seat, and gravely wounded by the unknown assailant.
Like many victims of violent crime, LaPorsha Washington must have felt like this was all one big, horrible nightmare. But that was not to be the case. Little Jazmine was gone.
In the days that followed, Washington participated in numerous videotaped interviews with national media. Her gut-wrenchingly tearful pleas for the killer to turn himself in were swallowed up by the mournful sobs that only a mother who has lost a child to mind-numbingly senseless violence can conjure. But just who could possibly commit such an unspeakable crime? What kind of craven, soulless creature could wantonly snatch such a beautiful and precious life?
According to Washington, she did not see the gunman, but one of her teenaged daughters described the shooter as a blue-eyed white man, wearing a black hoodie — who looked “sick.” A renowned suspect sketch artist was called in to construct an image from the shattered family’s recollections, which was subsequently released by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Washington then floated the idea to the national media that she (an African-American woman accompanied by three of her offspring, inside a vehicle without tinted windows) may have been targeted by the perpetrator of a “hate crime.” The distraught mother asserted that the crime was “racially motivated.”
Why? She is black, and she believed the assailant was white.
In a news conference last Wednesday, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez made clear that law enforcement was pursuing a number of leads, and would also revisit an unsolved 2017 investigation involving a white-on-black, nonfatal shooting that took place in the vicinity of this drive-by. […]
From Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, whose congressional district includes parts of Houston: “Do not be afraid to call this what it seems to be: a hate crime.” She went on to highlight the racial components of the case and implored the Justice Department to open an investigation.
Lee Merritt, the Philadelphia-based attorney representing Washington’s family (and incidentally, friends with Sherita Dixon-Cole, the fraudster in the Texas State Trooper hoax case that King promoted) joined with King to offer a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case. Merritt, without evidence, assessed that the crime was in all probability a “hate crime,” due to the “randomness and unprovoked nature” of the shooting.
King took to doing what King does best: stoke racial fires. First, he tweets a commendable call for information in the days following Jazmine’s murder.