Justin’s Death--Society’s Error : Another innocent is claimed by a gang bullet

Every day in Southern California, countless 12-year-olds board their bus after school, twitch around noisily and happily in restless anticipation of getting home and then bolt out of their seats like lightning in a jar when the bus stops near where they live. It’s such an endearing, moving sight, a traditional sight, this tableau of a civilization in the ritual process of educating its young, as if a sneak preview of the generational change to come.

This picture, however, was torn apart at a street corner in Altadena on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 21, for an unsuspecting 12-year-old named Justin Richards.

Who was Justin? Just one of those many kids who so delight the adults who know them. Rambunctious, some would say; but proud and determined, only days earlier flashing a positive progress report to a school official with a beaming sense of schoolboy achievement.

ONE HUGE PROBLEM: Justin wasn’t perfect, of course; very few kids that, or any other, age are. But he had only one enormous problem, one large deficiency, one inescapable impediment that obviously was too big for him to do anything about, too large for him to cope with, something utterly beyond his control.

And what was this daunting problem? Young Justin Richards happened to be growing up in a region that has allowed the poison of guns and gangs to ooze all over too many of our neighborhoods like some toxic chemical spill.

For when Justin got off that school bus and walked, unknowingly and innocently, into the cross fire of gang warfare, he ran smack into evil.

For the singular offense of going to school, trying to be a good kid and going home to his family on time, he wound up dead at Huntington Memorial Hospital. Even the best doctors could not save him from death, the victim of a stray bullet.

Yes, dead from gang warfare.

Dead by the incompetent hand of a society that does not know what to do about its gangs and also cannot control its many guns.

A FUTURE AT RISK: There will be other such horribly unjust deaths in the future. Count on that. Los Angeles still is not fully awake: Gangs and drugs are eating at the underside of this society’s fabric.

Unless and until the good people of Southern California rise up in collective anger, demand change and work together with immense and relentless determination to beat back these two evils, Los Angeles puts its entire future at risk.

There is no reason that could possibly justify the death of Justin. “He was a good son,” his shattered mother, Minnie Richards, said. She added, “He loved baseball.”

So when we think of Justin Richards we should think of ballgames under glorious sunny skies with unlimited amounts of popcorn and soda--his very childhood that has been ripped away from him. It’s a moral failure that our society numbly tolerates horrors like this.