Miriam Carey and Marlon Horton: Police Misconduct and the Pain for the Families

I had this image in my head of some expressionless white guy, wearing glasses and posing for his mug shot or obituary. The ignorance of this stereotype came to the surface, once I got home and saw the face of Miriam Carey, the 34 year old dental hygienist from Stanford Connecticut.  Ms. Carey was a black woman and a mother of a one year old baby girl who happened to be in the car at the time of the shooting

Hold up. Wait a minute, she did what?

My prejudice was overwhelmed by confusion, what did this woman do to make the police kill her in the car she was driving? And better yet why would she do it? 

It is said that Miriam rammed her car through police barricades and drove toward the US Capitol which has a high level of security. She then drove down Pennsylvania Avenue and crashed her car, which lead pursuing officers to shoot up the vehicle and kill Ms. Carey.  After reading more into the incident, it is said that Miriam suffered from Post-Par tum Depression, a mental illness that happens after child birth, some of the symptoms of the disease are apathy, sleep problems and obsessive worry, a small percentage of those victims also witness paranoia.

I’m not going to lie, this explanation didn’t sit well with me, and I’m going to tell you why. On September 7th, my brother Marlon Darius Horton was killed by an off-duty police officer at a Chicago Housing Authority building on Chicago’s west side. These buildings have a lot of apartments and have security throughout the building and premise. They are one of the structures that the city came up with after they tore down all the project buildings in the city. In fact these are basically the same thing as the projects; it just looks a tad bit more civilized.  Anyway my brother was going to visit his girlfriend, it was like 2 or 3 AM on a Friday night; it is alleged that he got into a confrontation with a couple of the security guards inside of the building, which lead to a angry off-duty Chicago Police Officer following him outside and killing him for urinating on his truck

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