OPINION | Race, Fear, and Firearms: We've Learned Nothing From the George Zimmerman Case

by Marcus Harrison Green

(This article is copublished with The Seattle Times.)

This is supposed to be a celebratory season for our youth, when thousands flock to high school and college campuses for graduation ceremonies. Yet all I can think about is our inability to stop burying our young.

If we were to go to one funeral a day for every young person killed by gun violence last year in the United States, we would spend more than four years attending memorial services, according to the Gun Violence Archive. We have six months left in 2024, and so far more youth have died in King County this year than all of last year.

Since 2006, guns have been the leading cause of death for Black children nationwide. They became that for all children in 2020, according to Brady United, a gun violence prevention group.

In the span of four days last week, teenagers Cristopher Yahir Medina Zelaya, Hazrat Ali Rohani, and Amarr Murphy-Paine were all fatally shot in King County.

Eighteen-year-old Zelaya was killed by a gunshot to his neck in a parking lot near his Kent-Meridian High School last Monday. No arrests have been made.

Seventeen-year-old Murphy, a beloved Garfield High student, was killed while trying to break up an altercation in the school parking lot.

The day before, 17-year-old Rohani, a schoolmate of Zelaya, was killed in Renton after 51-year-old Aaron Brown Myers deputized himself as an ad hoc police officer. Myers —an off-duty security guard who was recently booted from a public safety committee in Newcastle — approached Zelaya and his two friends after mistaking a defective air gun the trio was trying to return to BIG 5 for an actual firearm.

All three of their deaths were egregious tragedies. All three of their families deserve justice. All three circumstances were absurd.

But there is a distinct absurdity to Rohani's death, not just because of how preventable it was, but because of how perfectly it encapsulates the lethal narcotic of racism and guns that America can't seem to quit.

Myers was not a police officer. Nor was he a security guard hired to watch over that BIG 5. He was a man waiting for his son to finish a jujitsu class who assumed that Rohani and his friends planned to rob the sporting goods store. Had he continued to wait, Rohani would still be alive.

However, Myers felt perfectly entitled to get out of his car, accost three teenagers who had bothered neither him nor his son, and point his gun at them.

It didn't matter that they repeatedly told him the air gun wasn't a real weapon. It didn't matter that they complied with his commands, though they didn't have to. It didn't matter that Myers could have called the police if he was truly that concerned.

Myers, who is white, had no authority to do anything he did to Rohani, who is Muslim, or his friends. Yet he did it anyway.

He unloaded seven rounds of his gun into Rohani, shooting him dead in front of his friends.

According to court documents, Myers claimed he "had a duty to act to stop the individuals from hurting someone innocent." What putrid irony is that statement? Rohani was the innocent killed by Myers.

"There are certain folks, predominantly white folks, who I wouldn't even call gun enthusiasts, but shooting enthusiasts. People who failed to become police officers but still have this security guy persona. They're the ones manufacturing situations that are not there. It's exactly what happened at BIG 5. It's exactly what happened with George Zimmerman," said Daudi Abe, a Seattle Central College professor who teaches about culture and race.

George Zimmerman … it's hard for this case not to trigger the rotten remembrance of the overzealous neighborhood watchman, who killed Trayvon Martin in Florida after profiling the teen as a criminal.

Here we are 12 years later, remaining at a point when too many white men's fears and the ability to channel that fright through weapons of violence outweigh the freedom of others to exist in public spaces. Of course, we don't have to go back too far; we are barely a year removed from the killing of Elijah Lewis, a young Black man fatally shot by a white man in a road rage incident on Capitol HIll.

"I can only imagine how often a day these shootings come close to happening but don't when the dynamic is a white shooter and a suspect of color," said Abe.

When it comes to racially biased gun violence we are the equivalent of a habitual DUI offender who seeks marginal solutions to distract from a chronic problem: Let's install a breathalyzer in our car. Yeah, or we could stop drinking and driving.

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📸 Featured Image: Since the shooting at Garfield High School that killed Amarr Murphy-Paine on Thursday, June 6, 2024, a question parents and community members are asking is reflected at the memorial for Murphy-Paine. (Photo: Susan Fried)