Photograph from Denver Post / "Three Suspects Held
in Slaying of Denver Teen Reysean Abram"
in Slaying of Denver Teen Reysean Abram"
Quote by Cristie Horvath / CJYO 2013 Student
I do my best to keep up with current events, especially those which
are directly related to my field of study, however I search for news
articles far less often than I ought to because I don’t want to be
susceptible to placing all my stock into the media’s spin on things. As
Josephine Metcalf stated in From Rage to Rap and Prison to Print, “Gang
scholars Klein and Martin Jankowski raise awareness of the powerful and
influential role of all media in affecting public opinion on gangs.
They criticize the media’s tendency to lean towards sensationalized news
coverage of gangs in order to stimulate audience interest.” (Metcalf,
2009, p. 13) I have always believed that the media omits or emphasizes
certain points in their stories and sometimes embellishes actual facts
in order to make the target audience feel one way or another based on
the message they are wanting to convey at the time and we never get to
see the big picture, unless they want us to that is. One of the other
dilemmas that arise with attempting to keep up with current events while
in the field of criminal justice is that there unfortunately is a lot
of crime being broadcast in the news and it is nearly impossible to keep
up to date with everything. There is a reason the saying “if it
bleeds, it leads” is so popular in newsrooms across America.
There
is a story that garnered national media attention several years ago,
which changed some of my opinions and perceptions of the criminal
justice system a great deal. It was regarding the Casey Anthony trial
in which she was accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter Caylee
Anthony. I don’t have anything specific to quote from the judicial and
media circus that ensued, but I did include a link in my works cited of a
string of articles regarding Casey Anthony. In a nutshell - there was a
lot of damning evidence compiled against her, along with some evidence
erroneously overlooked that came to light later, Casey was fabricating
under oath many different unrelated stories that had more holes in them
than Swiss cheese, and was blaming everyone, except herself, for the
death of that 2-year-old innocent child. I personally believe that she
is guilty and I feel that the investigation and trial were so mishandled
that a truly evil person and criminal escaped facing the consequences
of their actions that day.
There was no ounce of justice
in this faux pas of a case. It made me realize that oftentimes our
system is not a perfect one and not just in the fact that this travesty
occurred, but also in the fact that said system has directly as well as
indirectly let down and failed a limitless number of people since it’s
inception – the juveniles that are locked away and forgotten about out
of sight out of mind, the innocents that somehow have found themselves
in the grips of an institution for crimes they never committed, the wisp
of an education system we have leftover from pouring most of our
funding into our corrections system instead (we spend more money on
corrections than education each year in this nation; my 5-year-old son
who recently started Kindergarten has to share his teacher and one aide
with 27 other students who are all expected to read and write at a 1st
grade level by the end of the school year, we have teachers who don’t
have enough seats or supplies for the amount of children they have been
assigned in a single classroom, and our elementary school cannot even
afford a tarp to cover their playground equipment to shield the little
ones from the hot, blistering desert sun and to prevent scalding metal
from injuring them.) I think our system has lost its way in some
aspects and I hope that in our lifetime we can get it on the right
track. I agree with Rodriguez in Hearts and Hands when he says, “All
this, and the increased prison building at the expense of colleges and
jobs, is a misdirection of social energies.” (Rodriguez, 2003, p. 45)
I
selected two current correlated articles from 2013 (the links are in
the works cited section below) that I feel are relevant to our readings
this week. The first article is titled “Three Suspects Held in Slaying
of Denver Teen Reysean Abram” and the second is “Gang Fears Prompt East,
Manual High Schools to Close.” Both articles were taken from The
Denver Post. The former discusses how a passing vehicle gunned down a
13-year-old boy named Raysean Abram while he was outside a party he was
attending while on his bicycle. The first article hints at the fact
that the media believes gang violence was a factor in Reysean’s death,
but was not explicit in saying so forthright. The article indirectly
accuses gang violence as the perpetrator. It also doesn’t try to get to
the heart of the matter and find out why this tragedy happened, or what
could be done to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.
The most it scrapes upon is saying, “His mother said Reysean ‘jumped in’
but his involvement did not go further than that. She said she had
become concerned by what looked like mounting tensions in some of her
son’s Facebook postings. Reysean himself appears to be flashing signs
in some of his photos.” (Gurman 2013) The media seemed to take a “oh
well this is gang violence for you and it happens all the time, now
let’s move on” stance on the issue though there was a missed opportunity
for them to delve beneath the surface and peel back the layers to
expose the core issues at hand. The latter of the two articles listed
was written a few days later and clarified that Raysean had died due to
suspected gang activity and highlights how he associated with the Crips
as well as engaged in “gang-like” activity via social media. After that
his story seems to fall off the map and is forgotten by the media save
for an archived tale that is stumbled upon from time to time.
The
Denver Post missed out on opportunities to deliver a powerful message
to their community. How did this 13-year-old find himself in this
situation? Why was he identifying with gangs? What could we (as a
community have done to help him)? What can we do better as a community
in the future to help youths like him? It seemed as if the media and
society had cast Reysean Abram aside as if he didn’t matter anymore. In
Hearts and Hands Rodriguez said the following, “They organized to
protect themselves within a society that had no place for them.”
(Rodriguez, 2003, p. 31)” This reminded me of Reysean. He felt he had
no one to go to and was crying out for help through social media and in
his actions and words, but no one saw and society did not seem to have
the time to care. “If this kid would have had this kind of support in
life, he would be here today.” (Gurman, Robles 2013) Like Rodriguez
writes in The Long Run (new introduction to Always Running), “Ramiro is
one of the statistics, although he’s not a number to me – he’s my son.”
(Rodriguez, 2005, p. xvi) Reysean is not just a statistic in the UCR
(Uniform Crime Report) - he is a brother, a son, a cousin, a neighbor, a
friend, and many more things to many more people and we should not
forget the Reysean’s, Tino’s, and Angel’s of the world. It is our duty
to help them.
-Cristie Horvath
