7 year-old Aiyana Jones Murdered by Detriot Cops
From Adrienne Maree Brown at Feministing:
“there is no justice. not for aiyana stanley jones.
there is punishment, and perhaps accountability. someone to point towards, many people, a trail of blame, stories, mistakes and tears.
but there is no justice.
i’m just home from a vigil for aiyana. i don’t like to go to these things because they make me feel too raw and hopeless. my partner, however, knew that we had to go and make sure aiyana’s story was told. so here it is: she was alive yesterday, 7 years old. she went to bed on a couch in a first floor room with her grandmother last night. in the wee hours of the morning, cops raided her house. a man outside the house shouted that there were kids inside. a man on the second floor of the house was a suspect in the murder of a 17-year-old last Friday.
the police threw a “flash bang” through the front window. it blinded everyone inside; it lit aiyana on fire.
the news reported a tussle with the grandmother, during which the firearm discharged. everyone in the family says there was no tussle, that the grandmother was throwing herself over the baby when aiyana was shot in the head.
what do you call the blinded, terrified groping of a grandmother who knows her grandchildren are in the room, blasted from safety and sleep into chaos and danger, whose granddaughter is on fire? how do you comfort a man like aiyana’s father, which was forced to lie face down in his daughter’s blood by the same police officers who killed her?”
*****
“In Detroit, a candlelight vigil was held last night following the death of a seven-year-old girl who was shot by police in her own home. The girl, Aiyana Jones, was sleeping when police raided her family’s home just after midnight on Sunday. Detroit police said an officer’s gun accidentally went off after the officer tussled with Aiyana’s grandmother. A bullet from the gun pierced Aiyana’s head and neck. The police raid began when police threw an incendiary device known as a flash-bang grenade through a front window of the home. The device reportedly burned the seven-year-old girl, who was sleeping on the couch. Police conducted the no-knock raid even despite warnings that children lived in the home. Police had been seeking a thirty-four-year-old murder suspect. Police say they got their man but have not said if he was arrested in the raid on the downstairs or upstairs apartment.”
*****
I’m a little to sad and upset to really say much.
