Like many of you, I've been locked into the cable news accounts of the SuccessTech school shooting yesterday in Cleveland. Thank God nobody was seriously injured, except of course for the shooter, Asa Coon, who took his own life.
Curiously, no news coverage (at least as of this morning) had shown a photo of the 14 year old shooter. Most of what I've seen was interviews with other students at the, which by all accounts seemed to be your typical inner city mostly black school. Part of me also wondered to a degree, why there was so much media attention for an incident that didn't really produce any casualties. It seems in this post-Virginia Tech world, any shooting, even at black schools (see the Del State incident a few weeks ago), is newsworthy.
Still, I wondered why they would go through the trouble of identifying the shooter, yet not show his photo. It couldn't possibly be because he's a minor. After all, some of the victims were also minors, yet their faces were all over the screen. And even if he is a minor, he is dead, so the usual media rules need not necessarily apply.
Turns out this kid is white.
Some of the kids called him Jack Black, the loud, chubby, long-haired actor in the movie "School of Rock."That being the case, I wonder if the media is shying away from photographic identification (thus far) because of the underlying racial element in this case. While Coon obviously can't be charged with a crime (he's dead), wouldn't this to some degree be considered a hate crime of sorts? I already smell Rebb'n Al's private jet warming up.
He could be loud sometimes, all right, and his appearance cried for attention: his shock of wavy brown hair, his fingernails painted black, the dog collar around his neck, his faded rock concert T-shirts under a trench coat.
But there was another Asa Coon, an Asa Coon far more menacing than the loopy kid with the unkempt hair and faux Gothic look.
The kid apparently had been showing signs of such potential aggression for weeks. He had been suspended from school. He had been getting his ass kicked on the regular (with a name like Asa Coon, this ain't much of a surprise). He had a history of domestic violence at home. He practically warned other students that he was going to do this. Why wasn't something done earlier to prevent such a thing?
I don't really know how else to read the coverage of this one for now, but stay tuned. We'll see what happens as this story develops.
School shooter has record of violence, suicidal talk [Cleveland Plain Dealer]
Student Gunman in Ohio Warned of Attack [ABCNews]
