Keep in mind that this whole thing was over a MAN!
Police paint portrait of fatal melee in South L.A.
By Richard Winton and Jean-Paul Renaud, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
A deadly and highly unusual melee among 30 young women in South Los Angeles was triggered by a dispute over a man who dated two of the female combatants, Los Angeles police said Tuesday.
Many of the women, while not gang members, had ties to men who belonged to gangs, police said. The two groups, authorities said, arranged to meet near Slauson and Western avenues to discuss the romantic triangle.
“The women associated with the rival groups went to the location to discuss it, but once there it quickly turned ugly,” said Police Cmdr. Pat Gannon, who is in charge of the South Bureau homicide unit.
At the height of the confrontation, a woman from one group got into her convertible, screamed and rammed the vehicle into the crowd, police said. Shontae Treniece Blanche, 22, an expectant mother and part-time student at Cal State Northridge, was struck and killed. A second woman was critically injured.
[SNIP]
“Some of the eyewitnesses said the suspect screamed as she drove through the gas station — something to the effect, ‘I’ll get you,’ ” Gannon said.
Bishop has been convicted twice of burglary and once of petty theft in the last two years, police said. Her latest conviction came after a July 26 arrest for burglary in South Los Angeles.
The article then gets into the background of the victim.
At her childhood home in a neighborhood about three miles northwest of the fatal confrontation, Blanche’s grandmother and cousin remembered her as a popular girl and bank worker who was determined to avoid trouble.
“She would tell me, ‘I’m not going to be like my mom,’ ” said Helen Hayes, 60, who raised her granddaughter.
According to Hayes, both of Blanche’s parents had been in and out of prison since Blanche was a young child.
Blanche, who was five months’ pregnant and married to a man in prison, was looking forward to a future as a mother and to graduating from Cal State Northridge. (more…)
I think the two things that really struck me about this story was A. How roughly 30 young women apparently are so bored with life that they show up to fight (sorry, not “discuss” as they claimed in the article) over a man. B. How folks like these individuals are depicted by both mainstream media and many Blacks. “B” is what really got me going this morning.
Here you have a crowd of mostly (if not all) Black women who show up to beat each other’s brains out over a man resulting in the death of pregnant woman and critical injuries to another. Because of the demographic of all involved in this story, every last one of them will be looked over by much of the public as a bunch of crazy, iggnat niggas. Now contrast that to the massive and free PR the Rutgers women’s basketball team received when they were called “Nappy-headed hoes” by Don Imus. All over the net and airwaves folks were tripping over each other to get the word out that these were highly-intellegent women whose lives have been forever damned by the comments of one old White man. Apparently the value of a Black individual goes up when they are insulted or harmed by a White person.
Both the young lady who was behind the wheel and the woman who was killed by the driver were both living in a self-perpetuating cycle way before this incident–the driver already had two prior unrelated convictions and the victim came out of a home of felons (not to mention she was married to one). Until folks are willing to see this cycle as ‘self-perpetuating’, society will continue to classify individuals like these 30 or so girls as ‘crazy a$$ niggas‘ –a classification that is in of itself a life sentence.
If you need another example, go back about a month or so to Jena, Louisiana where six young Black boys were being compared to civil rights pioneers (heroes) who had to languish in prison because of the color of their skin. Once pictures surfaced on the Internet of two of the boys showing off $100 bills and jewelry (some believe that this could have been some of the thousands of dollars donated to their cause), many Black folks across the net quickly began to dismiss them as (you guessed it) “niggas”. This especially rang true when two of the boys decided to parade down the red carpet for the recent BET hip hop awards show.
The most unfortunate thing here is that many of these kids like the members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team and the Jena 6 probably received more encouraging words and support after being offended by White folks than at any point of their lives (including from the home). Something about that is very wrong.
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