Gangs are not the only evil: ‘Where is the outrage?’
Edwin Johns Jr. was a hard-working college student gunned down a block from home. He didn’t deserve to die, but really, what kid does?
She’s a mother and a high school teacher. She works in South Los Angeles but lives in a different neighborhood, one that affords her family the luxury of an arms-length relationship with crime.
So Jill Norton was stunned when she heard that a former student at Jefferson High — a “sweet and innocent kid” who played on the football team, worked at a grocery store and graduated early to enroll in college — had been shot to death on Jan. 2.
She was even more surprised when her daily search of the newspaper failed to turn up a mention of Edwin Johns Jr. or the shooting that took his life.
“I found nothing about him,” Norton wrote to me. “Instead I found the article celebrating low crime rates, with a brief mention toward the end that 168 deaths were gang-related [last] year.”
Crime is down for the ninth consecutive year, to a level not seen since 1952. The rising tally of gang homicides seems like an aberration, especially since it is up from 2010. But five years ago, 300 people in Los Angeles died in gang-related homicides. So 168 is, at least, better than that.
It’s hard to celebrate, though, if you take that number to heart.
And Norton does, thinking about Edwin — “how he talked, how he thought … a kind, respectful, fun soul, just trying to make his way in life.” He was her student for three years, 90 minutes every day.
“I grew up in a small town,” Norton told me. “And 168 is the amount of students in my middle school and high school combined.
“I imagine if we’d all been murdered in one year.”
And she wonders — where is the outrage?