The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

When Do Black Lives Matter, and Why?

Posted on | September 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Cortavion Tyriques Shemerlee Murphy was 15 years old and behind the wheel of a stolen Dodge Charger traveling about 115 mph when he crashed into a tree, killing himself and four passengers, all minors.

The crash that killed Murphy and his passengers — two 15-year-old boys, Jaquarius Hegler and Marshawn Williams, and two girls, Elexus Hillsman, 16,and Deztanee Cobb, 17 — happened around 12:45 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 2, 2017. Shortly before the crash, the Dodge Charger had blown past a police car in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The cop had at first tried to pursue the Dodge, but gave up, telling the dispatcher: “Yeah, I’m going to have to terminate it. It’s well over 100 mph.” The officer continued traveling east on Main Street at normal speed and, about a mile later, came across the site of the flaming wreckage:

 

It took four days for the medical examiner to identify the charred remains of the five teenagers killed in this crash, using dental records. But immediately after the crash, Cortavion Murphy’s mother told local media she knew that her son was driving the Dodge:

Jamila McFerrin, Murphy’s mother, said she is still in shock.
“That’s my child, my first born,” McFerrin said. “We were just laughing, talking and taking pictures at 10:30 last night. To get called saying he was in his accident. I just thought it was an accident.”
“Losing my child is tough, but knowing he was the driver and responsible for other children in the car is tough as well,” McFerrin said.

Who was Cortavion’s father? Nothing I could find online gave any hint about that, but a bit of research shows that his mother was only 16 when she gave birth to him. Apparently, however, Cortavion and his mother were living with a man named Leonard Stafford. That information involves the story of how Cortavion got hold of the car:

According to the reports, police believe the driver waited until his parents were in bed to put a license plate that was not registered on the Charger before leaving home. . . .
Then-Undersheriff Paul Matyas said in a report he was approached by Leonard Stafford at the scene of the crash. Stafford told Matyas that “I just got that car. It didn’t have plates on it and it didn’t have insurance on it and I told him not to drive it, he must’ve taken the keys.”
The teen’s name Stafford was talking about was redacted.
The vehicle had been reported stolen out of Detroit in May 2016, according to Michigan State Police.
Officers contacted Stafford again Sept. 16 at his house in Kalamazoo.
“He said that he had not really bought the vehicle, that he had been doing work on the vehicle and the person he was doing the work for had not paid for his services,” KCSO Det. Sgt. Jim VanZile wrote in a report. VanZile wrote that Stafford told him a Detroit man brought him the car to work on in May 2017.
“He worked on the transmission and the engine of the vehicle and (the man) did not pay him for all of the work he had completed,” VanZile wrote.
Stafford told police the man was “one of those drug boys” from Detroit who sells drugs in Kalamazoo.
Stafford also told police he had put a plate on the vehicle from another car he was working on and had never insured the vehicle. He denied ever letting the teen drive the vehicle, and said he left the keys in the car the night it was taken. He said he did not know the vehicle was stolen out of Detroit in May 2016.

So, if we may connect the dots here, Cortavion’s mother’s boyfriend was doing repairs on this car that was stolen in Detroit, and which had been brought to him by a known drug dealer. The mother’s boyfriend denied knowing the car was stolen, and also denied giving the teenager permission to drive the car, although the keys were conveniently left in it.

You may be wondering why I am telling the story of this 2017 car accident. It’s because, unless you live in Michigan, you almost certainly never heard of the death of these five black teenagers. Why? Because there was no “systemic racism.” The story offered no political advantage to Democrats, and therefore the national media ignored it.

See, this is what I’ve figured out: “Black Lives Matter,” as the slogan of a political movement, is a wicked lie. Black lives only “matter” to these activists when a black person is killed by a white cop, a death that can be leveraged (a) to whip up a frenzy of anti-police anger, (b) to incite a generalized hatred of white people within the black community, and thus (c) to “energize” black voters to help elect Democrats.

As a statistical proposition, what #BlackLivesMatter claims about police and racism is easily disproven. Anyone who has followed the work of Heather Mac Donald (author of The War on Cops) knows that the actual number of unarmed black people killed by police is a tiny decimal point fraction in comparison to the number of black people killed by black criminals. But because black-on-black violence can’t be leveraged to support radical rhetoric about “systemic racism” (and thus to help elect more Democrats), the national media ignore the bloody death toll of black-on-black crime. The result of this one-sided media bias is a wildly distorted public perception of crime and race in America.

Whenever I write up a story like this, my intent is to balance the false perception created by the national media’s warped coverage, which feeds a myth of white racism as the one-size-fits-all explanation for every problem affecting black people in America. Racism obviously had nothing to do with the death of Cortavion Murphy and his passengers — and that’s why nobody outside of Michigan ever heard of this story. Five black teenagers killed and not a peep from CNN or the New York Times.




 

Category: Crime, Michigan, Racism

Comments

One Response to “When Do Black Lives Matter, and Why?”

  1. Politics and Death | 357 Magnum
    September 18th, 2020 @ 8:18 am

    […] Or when do “activists” dance in the blood of the dead, and when do they not? When Do Black Lives Matter, and Why? […]