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[Chicago Gonna Chicago] Teen murdered on family's front porch

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Cohete Rojo, Aug 16, 2016.

  1. Cohete Rojo

    Cohete Rojo Contributing Member

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    The kid came back home from a break at college to surprise his mom, and was then murdered while waiting for her on the family's front porch. No CF outrage? No #blm?

    [rQUOTEr]Son of Chicago cop, home from college to surprise his sick mom, killed in ‘mistaken identity’ shooting

    Arshell “Trey” Dennis, the third of his name, moved to New York to escape the home he loved.

    He grew up in the South Side of Chicago, a city that employs his father as a police officer but has also profiled the 19-year-old because of the color of his skin. It’s a city seemingly constantly in turmoil — bleeding each weekend from dozens of gun-related killings — and an environment Dennis said he felt thankful to leave.

    “I do appreciate that I am where I am,” he told his college roommate in a video interview last year. “A lot of people where I’m from don’t make it out.”

    The teen had plans: to graduate from St. John’s University in New York City and become a writer, to channel what he’d learned about poetry and struggle into words that might make something shift. He couldn’t change the world — he said for that he’d need two lifetimes — but Dennis felt his path, where he came from and what he knew, might be able to “influence.”

    “If you don’t know me,” he said in the video, “you gonna know me.”

    Just weeks from entering his junior year at St. John’s, the aspiring journalist and NAACP student chapter vice president flew back home to Chicago for the weekend, WGN TV reported, a surprise for his sick mother’s birthday.

    He sat on the porch of his family’s home Saturday night, talking with a hometown friend, when gunfire split the stillness of his ordinarily quiet Wrightwood neighborhood.

    Both were shot.

    The friend, 20 years old, was hospitalized.

    Dennis died.

    His mother’s screams echoed down the block.

    “You do not want to hear a mother’s cry for her son,” a neighbor, who would only identify herself as Brenda, told the Chicago Tribune.

    As of late Monday night, there had been no arrest, and authorities said the investigation was still open and active.

    In a news conference Monday afternoon, Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie Johnson said authorities were treating the shooting as a case of “mistaken identity.”

    “Arshell was a good kid, making his parents proud and studying for a promising future,” Johnson said in a statement.

    The superintendent, who worked with Dennis’s father, Officer Arshell “Chico” Dennis, in the 1990s, visited the family Sunday and said in the statement he was “at a loss for words for the amount of grief” they are experiencing.

    Though it’s well known in the neighborhood that the elder Dennis, a Drug Enforcement Administration task force officer, worked for the Chicago Police Department, the superintendent said there is “absolutely no credibility” to the theory that Arshell was targeted because of his father’s occupation.

    The two young men had no criminal records or personal histories of gang involvement, a police spokesman told the Chicago Tribune, but the shooting could still be gang-related. Some gangs have been conducting initiations, a police official told the Chicago Sun-Times, where recruits are instructed to shoot and kill whomever they find.

    “That’s a rite of passage for them,” Johnson told CBS News. “Now how bizarre is that?”

    On Sunday, the day Dennis was to return to New York, his loved ones scrubbed his blood from their sidewalk instead.

    “The loss of our son is stunning and painful,” the Dennis family said in a statement to the Sun-Times. “Tragically, we were going to take him to the airport today at 3 p.m. to return to school. Now because of this senseless violence, we will be grieving and planning his funeral. Trey was smart, funny, and the light of our lives.”

    Dennis graduated from Urban Prep Academy in 2014, where he ran cross country, played chess and participated in the Louder Than a Bomb poetry competition, according to his LinkedIn page. He also belonged to a preparatory program called Upward Bound. It was from a student in the program that director Gerald Smith heard the tragic news.

    “I got the phone call, and my heart just fell to my stomach,” Smith told the Tribune. “So, so unexpected. … I’m still in disbelief.”

    Last summer, Dennis returned to Chicago to work as an Upward Bound ambassador, Smith said.

    “He was one of my better students, he really was,” Smith said. “Arshell was a fun time. He was real easygoing, real quiet, laid-back, mild-mannered — he wasn’t a problem at all. It’s a tragic loss.”

    Terri Bachstrom, a neighbor and lunchroom attendant in Chicago Public Schools, told the Sun-Times Dennis was a well-mannered, quiet kid.

    “He wasn’t in a gang. He wasn’t affiliated with any of the nonsense that’s going on in Chicago,” Bachstrom said. “He wasn’t one of those kids.”

    Johnson said at the news conference Monday that to date in 2016, 85 percent of gunshot victims have had prior contact with police. Dennis and his friend were the exception, and yet this weekend, the two became part of the city’s growing violence statistics. In the same weekend Dennis died, nine people were killed and 31 more wounded in shootings across Chicago.

    Since Jan. 1, 2,607 people have been shot in the city, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis, on pace to far exceed the number of shootings last year, which totaled 2,988.

    It’s the kind of violence that Dennis used to discuss at St. John’s with his freshman-year roommate, 20-year-old Kyle DePina of Boston, reported the Sun-Times.

    “It’s crazy,” DePina told the newspaper. “You never think it will happen to someone you’re close to until it happens.”

    It was DePina who recorded Dennis in the 8-minute interview posted to YouTube in April 2015. They talk about police brutality and racial stereotypes. DePina asks his friend about his goals, what he wants to do, who he wants to be.

    “I do think that I’ll be able to influence a lot the way people think,” Dennis said. “And give them an outlook on the things I’ve been through, and things that people where I come from go through, and just help them get through the struggles that they go through.”

    That potential was universally mourned over the weekend.

    “He was a promising child,” Brenda, the neighbor, told the Sun-Times. “He was going somewhere.”[/rQUOTEr]
     
  2. amaru

    amaru Member

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    You don't know what BLM was created for do you?
     
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  3. Air Langhi

    Air Langhi Contributing Member

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  4. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

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    Not sure what there is to be said besides expressing my annoyance that you continue to draw this false equivalence between gang violence and police violence. Police are professionals with a duty to uphold the law, and have an obligation to the citizens who authorize and fund the police departments. Gangs are criminal organizations who have made no promises to uphold the law or to work in the best interests of the public, and refuse any accountability to the public. So it's reasonable for stakeholders in law enforcement activities (like the black citizens being policed) demand accountability. They could likewise protest the crimes committed by gangs, but there's no reason to expect to get meaningful change from criminals. The two problems are not at all similar and should not be compared.

    I think the crime wave in Chicago is an important subject worthy of discussion, but you derail your own threads about it by constantly referencing black lives matter. It's like asking anti-abortion activists why they are so silent about honor killings in Pakistan.
     
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  5. JayGoogle

    JayGoogle Member

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    #BLM isn't for gang violence.

    There are other organizations that are though, so nice try.

    Do you really care about this or are you just trying to make a political point?
     
  6. larsv8

    larsv8 Contributing Member

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    lol, he doesn't understand what BLM means
     
    Hakeemtheking likes this.
  7. Cohete Rojo

    Cohete Rojo Contributing Member

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    I assume it has something to do with the lives of black people being respected, but I could be wrong. Please, feel free to elaborate.

    Why should it matter if the murder is at the fault of police or not? The context of #blm is in their namesake: black lives matter. This kind of thread is nothing like your bizarre Pakistan abortion case; more like feminist women citing other women as being anti-feminist or not being progressive.

    What the hell then is #blm for? The namesake is: black lives matter. In this particular case you are saying that black lives do not matter?
     
  8. larsv8

    larsv8 Contributing Member

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    Swing and a miss.
     
  9. JayGoogle

    JayGoogle Member

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    .......It's a name dude...a hashtag meant to be trendy and grab attention...

    No, I'm not saying in this case and no one is saying that. If you really did care though you'd know that there are community initiatives doing their best to improve the city.

    Here's one...

    http://www.kidsofftheblock.us/

    You're welcome.

    But I know this thread isn't really about discussing solutions as it should be. More about advancing some tired conservative talking point.
     
  10. Cohete Rojo

    Cohete Rojo Contributing Member

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    Black Lives Matter is a chapter-based national organization working for the validity of Black life.

    That bolded text is from their website: http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/

    That is literally what they state their organization is working for: the validity of Black life. So you are still going with the ignorance route. Fine.
     
  11. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

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    I think you have confirmed that you actually do not know what BLM is about. It is not a generalized affirmation of the value of the lives of black people. BLM is focused squarely on the treatment of blacks by the government and especially law enforcement, both in the 'official' BLM organization, and in the unofficial usage of #BLM by sympathizers and allies. If you don't understand BLM is about the obligations of government to serve its black citizens justly, than you've been living in a deep, deep cave.
     
  12. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

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    From the same link:

    [rquoter]
    What Does #BlackLivesMatter Mean?

    When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.[/rquoter]
     
  13. TheRealist137

    TheRealist137 Member

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    You don't know anything about black lives matter. Take some time and do some research and you'll find hundreds of organizations that attempt to reduce inner city violence. Newsflash, organizations that strive to improve education and job opportunities indirectly seek to combat inner city violence even though it's not an explicitly stated goal.

    You are so ignorant. BLM is not the organization you think it is.
     
  14. JayGoogle

    JayGoogle Member

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    Good job taking one sentence from a page.

    "When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity."

    Hey, I can do that too!

    Any ways, so is this about the teen murdered in Chicago or BLM? Do you care any about the teen you posted about? It seems all you want to do is discuss BLM.
     
  15. DudeWah

    DudeWah Member

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    Cohete, you should stick to posting on your Facebook (where I'm sure you'll get tons of likes) and try to avoid anything that requires any actual brain power.
     
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  16. sugrlndkid

    sugrlndkid Member

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    BLM worries about the "state" taking their lives...NOT about killing each other!

    #DelusionalLogic #BLMfarce

    This story is yet another tragic reminder that a family is more likely to loose someone on the streets of Chiraq...Kid full of promise stolen in a blink of an eye. Rather lets glorify the life of a criminal Michael Brown!
     
  17. leroy

    leroy Contributing Member

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    People like the poster still believe there is an invisible "Only" as a prefix to BLM.

    The correct usage would be an invisible ", TOO" as a suffix.

    Sadly, people like the OP misinterpret what they're trying to accomplish.
     
  18. ipaman

    ipaman Contributing Member

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    I would argue that black on black crime is a much better cause to focus on than being powerless against the state at this moment.

    BLM could shift focus on something much more impactful in the short and long term. As a powerful and known commodity that BLM is, think of how much positive change they could do on this front. They can make head way and generate positive momentum and then shift focus back to the state. Priorities.
     
  19. Space Ghost

    Space Ghost Contributing Member

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    No matter which way you spin it, its an idiotic name and a complete oxymoron. Black on black deaths far exceed violence from the State. If BLM spent their energies on focusing on poverty and violence with blacks, State violence would also go down.
     
  20. ipaman

    ipaman Contributing Member

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    to all those saying BLM is not for gang violence, well it should be.
     
    fiersdownbelow likes this.

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