This is a great day for Kinston as the Vikings boys’ basketball team prepares to play for the 3A state title, but please take 15 minutes sometime over the next few days and read this story/column by ESPN’s Bill Simmons. If this doesn’t move you, make you sad or angry, then you’re not human.
My react: Growing up as a lower-middle class white person, I realize I’ll never understand the appeal of gangs. And I know we have a growing gang problem in Kinston. I don’t want to write this story in our town. Please, please — what can we do to stop this?
Blogging with Bryan C. Hanks 
March 15, 2008 at 8:19 pm |
That is a well written story about an awful thing. It frustrates and angers me, being a parent and it has got to be extremely frustrating for his parents knowing that they did everything they could to raise their son right and have his future taken by some punk with nothing better to do. Sadly there is really nothing that can be done about it unless you want to carry a gun everywhere that you go, and even then it could happen.
March 15, 2008 at 8:42 pm |
they may be one of the most moving columns/stories I have ever read. It’s one of the stories that at the end you just wipe away a tear and say rest in peace my friend, when you never knew the person but you feel like you knew them all of your life. so rest in peace JAS.
March 15, 2008 at 9:29 pm |
Bill Simmons is a fantastic columnist, and that was an excellent piece. And alluding to what Hanks said in his post, I hope I never have to read that story in the Free Press.
March 18, 2008 at 2:21 pm |
I read that piece and it really touched me. I’m a parent to one child and get nervous everytime she is out of my sight. My child is 18. We go thru alot of battles about her going and comings and be alert to her surroundings at all times but being a teenager/having a teenage mind, they don’t think like parents do. This child got killed being mistaken as someone else–but the sad thing is, he would have still killed him even if Jas would have told him over and over that he wasn’t the mistaken gang member. I really hope we can get a hold on this “gang” problem. We have to many talented kids (male,female) growing up that want to make great things of their lives. Senseless, killings are not the way to go. That story would be a great piece to discuss at area middle/high schools.
I agree with you Mr. Awesome.
P.S. While we are up here fussing about who knows what, why parades are not given in this city, why it’s being given in another city, etc. Think, just for one half of second, that could have been one of our children that Bryan Hanks would have been writing about. That piece really upset me because it was senseless.