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ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich. (WJBK) - A 14-year-old missed his bus and it nearly cost him his life.
Things took a dangerous turn when Brennan Walker went looking for help at a Rochester Hills home Thursday morning and was confronted by a man with a gun.
Walker was trying to walk the bus route to Rochester High School after he woke up late and missed his bus. His mom had taken his phone away, so he didn't have that with him to get directions. So he knocked on a stranger’s door for help -- and almost paid for it with his life.
"I got to the house, and I knocked on the lady's door. Then she started yelling at me and she was like, 'Why are you trying to break into my house?' I was trying to explain to her that I was trying to get directions to Rochester High. And she kept yelling at me. Then the guy came downstairs, and he grabbed the gun, I saw it and started to run. And that's when I heard the gunshot," he says.
Thankfully, the man missed. Brennan kept running, hid, then cried.
"My mom says that, black boys get shot because sometimes they don't look their age, and I don't look my age. I'm 14; but I don't look 14. I'm kind of happy that, like, I didn't become a statistic," he says in retrospect.
Oakland County Sheriff Deputies arrived soon after to the home on South Christian Hills Drive and took the woman's husband into custody.
FOX 2: "Your son almost became a hashtag."
"Exactly, and that's exactly how I feel. Like, wow. Because you were trying to get to school," says his mother, Lisa Wright. "I found out later the only reason [the man] missed is because he forgot to take the safety off."
Lisa was at work when she got the call. She says her husband is deployed in Syria, so she was assuming she was getting a call about him until she realized they were calling about Brennan. She dropped everything and immediately went to the substation to be with her son.
That's where investigators told her the family's Ring doorbell recorded the encounter. Investigators watched the video with Brennan and his mom. She says the video confirmed their suspicions.
"One of the things that stands out, that probably angers me the most is, while I was watching the tape, you can hear the wife say, 'Why did "these people" choose my house?'" she says, before taking a long pause. "Who are, "these people?" And that set me off. I didn't want to believe it was what it appeared to look like. When I heard her say that, it was like, but it is [what it looks like]."
Authorities haven't released that security video.
"We should not have to live in a society where we have to fend for ourselves. If I have a question, I should be able to turn to my village and knock on a door and ask a question. I shouldn't be fearful of a child, let alone a skin tone," she adds. "This is a decent neighborhood. If anything -- why would I knock on your door to rob you?"
"It is just absurd that this happened," says Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard. "I feel terrible for the young man; I feel terrible for the mom and the anxiety that they had to go through. We are going to ask for every charge permissible for this guy, who stepped up and fired a shotgun because someone knocked on his door."
Right now that man is being held at the Oakland County Jail. He's expected to be arraigned sometime on Friday.
Sources tell FOX 2's Randy Wimbley the 53-year-old Rochester Hills man is a retired Detroit firefighter.
Stay with FOX 2 for updates.
surprised there is no thread/discussion on the starbucks philly incident
“A racist attack nearly left me without an eye,” actor Marius Makon posted on Twitter. “Racism will never defeat us, love, love and love.”
Makon, who was born in Cameroon and is also known as Elton Prince, was referring to a Saturday assault in Madrid that left him bruised and bloodied.
According to a Facebook post by Makon, the actor and his friends had stepped up to order coffee early Saturday when a couple approached him.
“I don’t want black people in this place or in front of me,” the woman, 33, reportedly said. Makon wrote that he tried to de-escalate the situation, telling her, “I will only be here for a moment and then I’m leaving. I don’t have any interest in staying near you for long.”
The woman then reportedly called him a “black piece of s---.” When he asked her to calm down, he wrote, she began attacking him with a glass bottle. She hit him twice on the head, Makon said, causing a cut and other injuries that required seven stitches.
“I’m white,” she allegedly said. “I can kill you and nothing will happen.”
The owners of the restaurant intervened and called police. When authorities arrived, they briefly detained the woman but released her after she gave a statement. The Spanish Immigration and Refugee Support Network has urged Madrid prosecutors to investigate the incident as a hate crime.
“Now I am in my house and I look through these images [of his injuries] I do not feel any hate towards the woman,” Makon posted on Facebook. “I want to say that I am not angry with her and I don’t know why. I am sad that she feels such hate, that she lives with hate. It saddens me that she does not enjoy life, that she doesn’t leave a small space in her heart to love.”
About 1 million people of African origin live in Spain, and many say racism is a near-daily reality. In interviews conducted by the Spanish newspaper El Pais, members of the black community in Spain reported being told such things as “Go back to your … country,” “I don’t rent apartments to people like you,” “If you shower, do you lose your color?” and “Your cousins are monkeys.”
Spain still lacks an anti-discrimination law, and last week, the Council of Europe urged the nation to create an independent anti-racism body. It is one of only two European countries — the other being San Marino — without an agency devoted to tackling racism.
Most def needs be in the wildin thread.Virginia Man Shoots Himself in His Leg, Blames Injury on 2 Black Men
A Spotsylvania County, Va., man was arrested and charged with felony offenses Sunday after authorities say he shot himself in the leg and then attempted to blame his injury on two (imaginary, non-existent) black men.
Remember that Kansas City firefighter charged with spitting on a 3-year-old in an Overland Park Hooters and calling that child the n-word? He’s already gotten his job back, his lawyer says, ahead of his trial next month for battery, assault and disorderly conduct. Yet according to the child’s family, what happened that night was even worse than we knew from the initial story.
The child’s grandfather, Raymond L. Harris, says the firefighter not only called him the n-word, too, but also threatened to shoot him. Then, according to boy’s great-uncle, Michael Mitchell, the restaurant manager called police. Not to report the spitter and slurrer, mind you, but to report his family. The manager kicked them out instead of the firefighter. And while Mitchell stayed behind and settled up, the rest of their party fled in fear, without even pausing to grab their untouched birthday cake, despite having done nothing wrong.
At first, this seemed to be a story about one man, 42-year-old first responder Terrence Jeremy Skeen, a 15-year veteran of the Kansas City Fire Department. Skeen’s much-admired calling in life, in theory, anyway, involves putting his life on the line for any Kansas Citian who needs his help. Yet here he was, charged with behavior befitting such a straight-up racist that he’d raged and spit at a little kid. Skeen’s lawyer, Tom Bath, said his client’s side of the story “will all come out at the trial,” but he’s pleading not guilty and is back on the job, after being “suspended incorrectly.”
Whatever happens to Skeen, though, the fuller, sadder and more telling account of that night also involves the cascade of assumptions made by other, not-screaming and not-spitting folks on the evening of Feb. 26.
It was Harris’ son, who’d turned 18 that day, who wanted to celebrate at Hooters with his family. About 25 relatives turned out for him, along with a few friends from work, to spend some money and spend some time together. Some had just arrived and were ordering when Harris went chasing after the 3-year-old. Just as Harris caught up with him, a woman sitting nearby asked, “Sir, excuse me, is that child with you?” That’s my grandchild, yes. “That guy over at the bar just spit on your grandson.”
“You need to get that f---ing girl and take her back to the other side where you came from,” Harris says Skeen called. He’s a boy, Harris answered, flustered. But more to the point, “Did you spit on my grandson?” Harris says Skeen responded this way: “F--- you, you (n-word). I will spit on you. F--- you! I will shoot you!”
The firefighter’s friend weighed in, too, Harris says, if only to state the obvious: “He don’t like kids of that kind.”
Harris returned the child to his mom and was about to go back to the firefighter to resume their little chat when some of his relatives intervened. “I was very upset, angry and emotional and my family had to take me outside ... into the parking lot to let out my anger and frustration.” Mitchell kept telling him, “It’s OK; we’re going to handle this, and we’re going to call the police.”
They were still outside, taking some deep breaths, when Mitchell’s wife came out and informed them that the cops had already been called, but on them. In fact, she said, the manager had asked them to pay up and leave — they were kicked out, he said — but he’d said nothing at all to the firefighter.
That’s when, except for Mitchell, their group scattered like a bomb had gone off. They were afraid Skeen had a gun, and afraid, too, Harris says, “because of stories you hear about the police shooting black people.”
When the cops did arrive, and Mitchell was the only one standing there, “one police jumped out and said, ‘Where is everybody? We were told there were 20 to 30 people out here causing a disturbance.’ ”
It wasn’t like that, Mitchell told them. He also said he wasn’t leaving until they talked to the real source of the problem, and pointed out Skeen. Then another of the half dozen officers who’d responded told Mitchell that he was not welcome back inside, but needed to pay up before leaving. So on top of everything, Mitchell said, “they were making it like we were trying to eat and dash,” after a long-planned party for which they’d been in repeated contact with the restaurant.
He did pick up the tab — $240 for the orders already served — left his number with one of the officers, Shawn Fernandez, and headed for home. Before he even arrived, he received the first of three calls from Fernandez, who told him that as they’d been taking witness statements and putting together what had really happened, Skeen had told them, “It’s OK, I’m a firefighter.” Definitely not OK, Mitchell says Fernandez told him. “We don’t want anyone to think because he has a badge, he’ll get away with this.”
A spokesman for the Overland Park Police Department, Officer John P. Lacy, confirmed that “What we got called to was a disturbance” and that Fernandez had reached out to the family.
Hooters seems to have tried to make things right, too. The CEO wrote to Mitchell and told him they’d suspended the manager, and offered to refund his money, though Mitchell said that wasn’t necessary, because Harris had reimbursed him already. A PR representative of the company reiterated its earlier statement that “Hooters does not tolerate any harassment or discriminatory language, the safety and well-being of our guests and employees are our utmost priorities.”
But Harris remains so upset his voice shakes when he talks about that night. “This world is so cruel,” he says quietly. If your adored grandchild had been spit on, wouldn’t your voice be shaking, too? And even beyond Skeen’s behavior, the assumptions made that night were dangerous, and in no way out of the ordinary.
The manager apparently figured it was the black family who had to be at fault, and that they were the ones who needed to leave. How long is that going to be the default position?
The police, who handled the situation well once they learned the facts, arrived with those same assumptions, only knowing what they’d been told.
The firefighter seems to have assumed that he’d tell the cops who and what he was and that would be that; had that happened before? And the family had some assumptions, too, about how wrong things could go if they hung around.
Wrong, just for starters, like they’d gone in February at that Applebee’s in Independence, where a manager and police officer accused two innocent African-American women of not paying their bill the night before. Or wrong like they went last week in Philly, where two black men were arrested in a Starbucks while doing nothing but waiting for a business associate.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article199595519.html
Or even wrong like they went in Rochester Hills, Michigan, where an African-American kid who missed his school bus one day last week got lost walking and wound up being shot atafter a couple assumed that he’d knocked on their door not because he was looking for directions but because he was trying to rob them.
Or God forbid, wrong like they went in Sacramento, where a young black man died last month after police shot him in his own grandmother’s backyard. The weapon they thought they’d seen turned out to be a cell phone.
So why would anyone who isn’t guilty run? See above. In leaving in a panic after the cops were called to Hooters, Mitchell’s family was really only assuming what they knew to be true: that even in a situation as benign as a toddler toddling a few feet away, an interaction can go from nothing to something before you can say, “Who had the Cobb salad?”
“We was having a good time until all of that happened,” Harris said. “But it turned into a disaster.”
Better to disappear first and ask questions later, to keep a night gone wrong from getting any worse.