The Other McCain

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There’s Always a Backstory: Why Was Ma’khia Bryant Living in a Foster Home?

Posted on | April 21, 2021 | Comments Off on There’s Always a Backstory: Why Was Ma’khia Bryant Living in a Foster Home?

Look closely at that photo. It’s what Columbus, Ohio, police Officer Nick Reardon was looking at a split second before he fired his pistol. The fat girl in blue jeans — 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant — had a kitchen knife in her right hand and was about to stab the woman in pink. In the parlance of cops, that’s called a “good shoot,” but the liberal media headline is not “HERO COP SAVES WOMAN FROM KNIFE ATTACKER.”

No, the media are playing the BLM “white guilt” race card here, simply because Officer Reardon is white. The fact that the woman he saved from being stabbed is black? Never mind that. It doesn’t fit the media’s preferred narrative, in which white is a synonym for bad.

Understand that I’ve spent months watching police videos on the Police Activity YouTube channel, so I’ve become sort of an amateur expert on how these kinds of incidents generally go down. As in this case, police often arrive on a scene of confusion, with only a brief description of what’s happening based on a frantic 911 call. When you watch bodycam video of incidents like this — and, as I say, what happened in the Ma’Khia Bryant case isn’t really unusual — it can be difficult to understand what you’re seeing, because it happens so fast amid confusing circumstances. But the important thing to know is, there is always a backstory.

 

Police do not go around shooting people at random. In most cases, the suspect who gets shot by cops has an extensive prior criminal history. Often, they are convicted felons out on parole or probation, engaged in drug dealing, driving a stolen car or illegally possessing firearms (sometimes all three at once). In other cases, the person who gets shot by cops is mentally ill, basically doing “suicide by cop.” So in terms of probability, the vast majority of people, whatever their race, are never in danger of being shot to death by police. It doesn’t happen randomly.

Even in the case of Breonna Taylor, the reason she got shot was because (a) her ex-boyfriend was a drug dealer who had been using her apartment as his mailing address, and (b) her new boyfriend had a gun and fired at the cops who raided the apartment, evidently fearing that it was Breonna’s ex-boyfriend busting down the door. It wasn’t random.

So what’s the backstory in this case?

Franklin County Children Services (FCCS) released a statement saying that Bryant, 16, was a foster child who was under the care of the Franklin County Children Services. . . .
The girl’s aunt, Hazel Bryant, told reporters that her niece had been living in a foster home on the east side of Columbus, where the fatal shooting took place. According to her, several adult women had come to the foster home and started an altercation with the teenager, who had then called police, her biological father as well as her grandmother for help. Then to defend herself, Ma’Khia grabbed a knife. . . .
Her mother, Paula Bryant, told 10 WBNS, “She was a very loving, peaceful little girl. She was an honor-roll student, and Makiyah had a motherly nature about her. She promoted peace.” . . .

OK, two obvious questions:

  1. Why was Ma’Khia in the care of county children’s services?
    and
  2. Why did these women “come to the foster home” and start a fight?

It seems difficult to reconcile the known facts with Ma’Khia’s mother’s claim that she was a peace-promoting honor student.

My guess (and it is only a guess) is that Ma’Khia being in foster care had something to do with her own behavioral problems, which in turn explains these adult women being in an altercation with her. We don’t actually know what happened or why, but whatever the story turns out to be, we can surmise that this was not a random incident. It never is.




 

Category: Crime, Ohio, Racism

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