By now many have heard the sad case of another Black man shot by a U.S. police officer, this time an upstanding legal Caribbean immigrant with a stellar future ahead of him and from an upstanding family.
According to Dallas police reports, St. Lucia-born Botham Shem Jean, 26, was in his home in the South Side Flats of Dallas, Texas, when he was shot dead by a Dallas police officer around 10 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 6, 2018.
This incident is unlike so many police brutality stories you hear and unlike the false claims by the U.S. commander in chief that immigrants come to the U.S. to rape and murder and commit violent crimes against native-born Americans.
In this instance, Botham Shem Jean was in his own apartment after a day’s work at accounting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers when he was shot dead by a cop. By all indication, Jean is exactly the kind of immigrant Trump loves to claim he supports—an immigrant who would easily fit under the label “merit-based,” an immigrant who completed a college education in America and was working hard, paying taxes and being an upstanding resident in his adopted homeland.
Jean attended church, sang in the choir, gave back and has no rap sheet that can be dragged up to defame him and his family.
Yet, this young immigrant was senselessly and bizarrely shot to death in cold blood by a 30-year-old white, female Dallas police officer who has stuck to the story that she thought she was entering her own apartment and thought Jean was an intruder.
No report to date has addressed whether the officer, now identified as Amber Guyger, ordered Jean to halt and put his hands up or had a dialogue or any other conversation before she killed him.
What is most bizarre is exactly how Guyger entered Jean’s apartment thinking it was her own. Was the door to Jean’s apartment open, leading to her drawing her weapon and, being on alert, enter and open fire without asking questions?
Did Jean let her in? Did they know each other and were they having a personal relationship that went bad? There are more questions than answers.
The fact, however, is that you cannot mistakenly enter someone else’s apartment thinking it’s your own because your key would not work and you would soon realize it’s not your apartment.
The other scenario that is possible, based on Guyger’s claim to date, is that she was trying to get into the apartment with her key, which was not working, and Jean opened the door after hearing a noise outside his door. There was an argument with the officer, still thinking he was in “her apartment” and Jean was an intruder and she opened fire.
These are all scenarios that make sense rationally, compared with what has been said and released so far. What is further disturbing, is that the officer was not arrested and charged with a crime until almost three days later.
And when she was charged, she was charged with manslaughter and released on bail. Manslaughter not murder! Further, the arrest only came after the Jean family met with the Dallas DA and demanded Guyger be arrested.
Contrast this entire situation to if Jean had been the one to enter Guyger’s apartment by mistake, and then shoot and kill her. Do you really believe that he would have been arrested three days later, and then only slapped with a manslaughter charge and given bail?
Do you think the U.S. president would have stayed silent as he has done with this case? Absolutely not! He would have set Twitter alight immediately, as he has done so many times when immigrants have been accused of crimes.
And that is exactly where justice is not blind, and the hypocrisy of the right continues to tear this country apart. There is always a different kind of justice for Blacks, Latinos and immigrants, who are presumed guilty until proven innocent.
If Jean had been the one who shot and killed Guyger, Donald Trump and his right-wing cult would have used that as the campaign theme into November, much like they have done with the Molly Tibbets case and her alleged killer, Mexican immigrant Cristhian Bahena Rivera.
Just like they have done with so many other cases in which immigrants have been the alleged killers, all the while using fake data to support the xenophobic claim that immigrants are committing the most crimes against Americans and it is why we need to round them up, deport them, keep them out and build the wall.
They cannot use this narrative with the Jean case and so, like the hypocrites they are, they choose to stay silent, perpetrating the double-standard and widening the racial divide, all while an innocent immigrant Black man has had his life cut short and a Caribbean immigrant family must now bury their son and find a way to come to grips with his horrific murder. But who cares? It does not fit into the Trump narrative and it’s just another Black man!
The writer is CMO at Hard Beat Communications, Inc., which owns the brands NewsAmericasNow, CaribPRWire and InvestCaribbeanNow.