A child was murdered in Montgomery on Monday.
A 6-year-old little girl, asleep in her bed, was shot dead in a drive-by shooting. Her name was Caylee Taylor.
She should be playing hide-and-seek in the summer sun and sneaking popsicles as she prepares to enter the first grade. Instead, her family is making funeral arrangements.
And we will never know what we’ve lost.
A doctor who saved lives? A police officer who protected others? A teacher who educated the next generation?
We’ll never know because Caylee Taylor is forever six. Her life was cut tragically short by another person whose life is also now over. That person, although older, is also lost to most of the world – will never be anything but a number inside a prison, where, against long odds, hopefully he can make some sort of meaningful contribution.
And for what?
A stupid beef over territory? Or drugs? Or a perceived disrespect?
The stupidity of whatever reason ultimately becomes the motive for the murder of this 6-year-old little girl will always be staggering. It will never make sense.
I want you to truly consider what happened here. Multiple people – because you know there had to be more than one person involved – obtained a high-caliber weapon, loaded it up with ammunition, hopped in a car and drove to a neighborhood at 2 in the morning so they could fire into an occupied home.
They did not care about who was in there, obviously. They did not care that they might kill a child, obviously. They did not care that they might be ending their own lives as free men. They did not care about the neighbors. They did not care about their futures, or the futures of anyone else.
They simply wanted to shoot someone. So they did.
A whole bunch of people have a whole bunch of opinions on the crime and violence that exist in Montgomery. They talk often about the rate of shootings in the city. They pound their fists about the understaffed police department. (Some have tried to pass legislation about it.) And they have, of course, laid a whole bunch of blame at the feet of Mayor Steven Reed.
The murder of Caylee Taylor, though, should tell us all that the story is far more complex, far harder to fix, far deeper than a campaign slogan tag line and far more troubling.
There aren’t enough cops in the world to have prevented it. There isn’t a mayor’s proclamation strong enough or wise enough to have stopped it. There isn’t a rightwing or leftwing solution to it. And you absolutely, 100-percent cannot bully your way to the solution.
Because what killed that little 6-year-old girl was decades of failures. Failures that left certain communities dealing with generational poverty and disadvantage. Failures that made it insanely easy for anger-fueled young men to obtain firearms and an unlimited supply of ammunition. Failures that made risking your life to be a cop for a low-middle class salary and no lucrative pension to look less and less appealing with every uptick of yearly inflation. Failures that left a couple of generations of young men undereducated, hopeless, poverty-stricken and angry.
These issues are not unique to Montgomery, unfortunately. And honestly, it’s continually weird to me that Montgomery gets such intense scrutiny, given that its crime rates, shooting rates and murder rates are not the worst in the state, and are, in fact, outside of the top 10 in some categories. It’s also weird that no matter how many times Reed shows people the stats and percentages showing the drops in crime rates, he gets shouted down by people – many of whom live in Montgomery – who want to believe things are worse.
All of that only further exacerbates the problem, because as everyone points fingers and tries to lay out the most politically advantageous blame, those underlying problems only continue to grow. The anger continues rising. The disregard for human life continues to swell. The desperation continues to get worse.
And you see where this has gotten us.
Isn’t it time for everyone to set aside the BS, to stop pointing fingers at each other, to stop trying the bumper sticker solutions to problems that have taken decades to create? Could we for just a moment, in honor of a 6-year-old little girl, maybe try to be compassionate and caring and smart about this?
Because if you don’t figure out some ways to turn down the anger, to turn up the educational opportunities, to push down the poverty levels, to reduce the number of firearms, to raise the respect for life and to inject a little humanity and decency into this situation, nothing is ever, ever, ever going to get better.
