I wrote in my last post about the recent fatal shooting of Peyton Strickland, an unarmed Cape Fear Community College student and his dog at their off-campus college home by a New Hanover County Emergency Response team assisting the UNCW Police, trying to serve an arrest warrant for him and his roommate, a UNCW student, both suspects in a violent on-campus crime, in Wilmington, NC. I wrote about this because I've been writing online about Wilmington, North Carolina and UNCW, in one place or another, since The Oldest went there for college in 2001.
I said it in my post, as I've said it over and over again in this blog, but it's hard to send our kids off to college, away from our watchful eyes, away from being close enough for us to be there to reach out and snatch them to safety if they should stumble, after so many years of making that one thing our whole lives. We don't love them any less because they're eighteen or twenty or twenty-five and live far away, than we did when they were babies in our arms. We don't love them any less because they've made a mistake.
Growing up is a time of making mistakes and learning from them. Even really good, maybe even really great kids make errors in judgment on their paths to maturity. Sometimes the high levels of impulsivity that cause these kids, often boys, to make mistakes, even catastrophic ones, reside within the very same cluster of personality and behavior characteristics that can lead to them becoming great entrepreneurs, top management training performers, exceptional craftsmen, skilled professionals, artists, or even (particularly?) heroes in battle. Still, they have to live through their mistakes to reach the new and better possibilities that remain before every young person who behaves foolishly, gets caught and learns from it.
My sons have made mistakes. In fact, in parenting my three sons into their young adulthood, I have had the chance to know so many boys who are now young men, most well on their way to successful lives. A whole lot of them made mistakes, even sometimes the honor students and Eagle Scouts among them made mistakes. They haven't all survived.
Towns with colleges have to walk that fine line of making it a great place to go to school, supporting the university communities and all they include, while also keeping the hormone-fueled high-energy youth in hand. Maybe sometimes it even becomes a series of revenue streams, to churn them through the jail and court systems for underage drinking related crimes while looking the other way as consciously developed and very profitable bar districts serve them again and again, as is the case in Athens, home of the University of Georgia.
I've been a UNCW parent and a Loyola University New Orleans parent and I think both of the universities my sons have attended do a pretty good job of balancing allowing freedom with providing a safe environment. It's a challenge for every school, to counter appropriate coming-of-age permissiveness with a supporting structure, but perhaps particularly for Loyola, since, in Louisiana, it's legal to possess and consume alcoholic beverages in one's private residence at eighteen. Loyola also provides their students with extensive information and support, in an effort to try to keep them safe when they leave the confines of the campus, since, well, it's New Orleans. They teach their students during the orientation process how to avoid getting arrested or mugged, but failing that, how to do so without getting hurt. The dynamic is reversed in Wilmington, with a greater focus on the city's need to keep the rowdy students in control. Both schools, like many colleges, support significant percentages of their students living off campus.
When I first mentioned this at the end of the previous post, I did so primarily in response to reading so much hate-fueled misinformation about these boys and this tragic series of events online, and in the wake of seeing the story covered in the national news. I didn't anticipate, coming just after the police shooting of an unarmed man leaving his bachelor party in New York and the killing of a frightened grandmother by Atlanta police serving a "no knock" drug warrant before Thanksgiving, that this story would fade so quickly from the mainstream national press. Neither did I expect the responsibility I would feel upon seeing the resulting search returns produced by my previous post (and tags).
Wilmington and UNCW are stars on the rise. The city fans out from the idyllically beautiful business district that's perched on the sloping banks of the Cape Fear River and from the coastal communities that extend along the Atlantic shore, to encompass the school's exceptionally pastoral campus, over seven hundred pine-filled acres, a well-defined world of its own, an institution in a growth spurt, with a loving spirit and a commitment to academic excellence. It's a great place to go to school, a great place to live and a great place to visit.
Amidst every loss lies an opportunity for healing, and a responsibility to correct mistakes. The New Hanover County Sheriff's Department will, just like erring young people, face the consequences of their actions. They will get the chance to lead by example, to learn from their mistakes and change. One of the officers involved has been fired. It has been made public that at least one of the bullets that struck Strickland most likely first passed through the door. This is America. The public servants we've entrusted and armed to protect us have a responsibility to extend that protection to all of us, even those of us who have made mistakes, to have systems, training and constant evaluation in place that avoid the killing of unarmed citizens, especially within our own homes. Every community involved in this can improve because this has happened. They can change, make amends and become safer, better communities by learning from their mistakes.
Edit: New Hanover County Sheriff's Deputy, Christopher Long, who was fired from his position last Friday, will be charged with second degree murder in this case. That was fast. It's all so sad.
Edit 12/13: This morning CNN reports that yesterday's report that Deputy Long was to be indicted for second degree murder was an error that resulted from the Grand Jury Foreman's checking a wrong box on paperwork. It seems there are plenty of mistakes to go around in this tragic case.
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