It’s not always the crime that drives the media attention, it’s the public reaction. In the case of John’s death, because he was so well known in a media savvy community, there was a bunch of media to the reaction of the initial crime. Message boards, community meetings,twitter, facebook etc. all helped raise money to raise to catch these punks. People made the media care.

Serious and unprovoked attacks happen in the completely innocent people all of the time. And it should be given attention whether it routine or not. Have you been hearing much of anything of the deaths of 30+ school children going on in Chicago? Where are all the stories of pocs that go missing? Color of the victims matter very much when it comes to the amount of attention a crime is given.

maybe that is what i want to say.

I guess my point is that this was not a white vs. black thing. This was a very serious and unprovoked attack of a completely innocent young man. If this happened in a neighborhood where good people are routinely murdered for a few hundred dollars, then perhaps there would not have been much media coverage. But it didn’t.

Do you think there would be less outrage if a white person committed the crime?
Your comment is baseless and stupid.

I also have the very nagging feeling that this would not have been such an event, with all this coverage and reaction had the victim been black.

"The guns used in the Henderson killing were a 9mm Smith & Wesson stolen from a construction worker’s vehicle in Atlanta in October and a 9mm Glock owned by Ashley Elder, another bartender at Standard the night of the killing. Police are still looking for Elder’s gun.

Police say Henderson, 27, was shot once in the head and twice in the leg. They did not disclose which gun fired the fatal shot."

This seems to imply the other bartender was armed and that the gun was taken and perhaps even used to commit the murder. I’m relatively ambivalent on matters of gun control but I do think that adds an interesting dimension to the "get guns and kill the bastards" line of discussion that arose from this crime.

I’m a pretty firm believer that big events shouldn’t be the basis for policy change – knowledge of what happened can change (as this event showed, initial reports were almost 100% inaccurate), you get too caught up in specifics of an incident, and you can miss the big picture. Or, if a particular incident gets resolved, the larger movement can lose momentum.

Rising crime has been an issue in this town for years, and arresting someone for this murder doesn’t really change that very much. I mean, it is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. Maybe I’m just too much of the Wire and not enough West Wing this morning.