Rambling Rhodes

Let the fisking begin

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is something I try to read every day. There's this columnist there, goes by the name of Nick Coleman, and he had an odd piece in today's paper that just screams for a good fisking, if for no other reason but because it apparently has no freaking point:

Outside the Cub Foods store near E. Lake Street in south Minneapolis, where a 20-year-old kid was left on the curb with a bullet in his chest, a sign says, "No Soliciting, No Loitering, No Flyer Distribution."

Well, clearly, then, that victim was violating the No Loitering stipulation. What's the problem?

Some freelancer has added a smiley face and another prohibition with a marker: "No Nothing!"

A freelancer? That's stretching, I think, but whatever. I'm sure this Nick Coleman guy is going to have a point somewhere around here. Granted, we're two paragraphs in already, and we don't yet know what he's whining about. So much for the inverted pyramid approach to news writing.

It goes without saying that No Nothing includes No Body Dumping.

Not necessarily. I think some specificity like that could do wonders.

But it shouldn't go without noting that we have reached the point where a body in a grocery store parking lot doesn't faze us. A car roared up to the Cub store at 7 o'clock Wednesday night and dumped Tremaine Finley on the pavement beneath a neon sign promising "Twenty-Four Hour Savings."

What the hell is going on here? Is Nick upset that Finley was dumped out of a roaring car, or that Cub promised 24 hour savings? Does he think the folks who dumped him out were making some sort of capitalistic statement here? What the hell does one have to do with the other? Nick continues. . .

The shopping went on, uninterrupted. The savings didn't.

Yup, people just went about their shopping business. A few people even absentmindedly ran their carts over Finley's body, oblivious to its presence.

Finley died at the hospital, his bloody clothes left behind by paramedics while shoppers walked around the police tape.

What, exactly, should Cub have done? Closed it's doors for the day? Proclaim that, from that day on, Cub would observe a Tremane Finley Day of Mourning? I mean, come on, people also drive past car accidents every single day. What were the shoppers supposed to do? Realize a crime had taken place there and forever swear off shopping at Cub?

The cops didn't have far to come.

The Third Precinct police fort is just across Lake Street from Cub.

First off, "police fort?" And second off, yeah, everyone knows that police precincts intuitively know, ahead of time, when a car is going to roar up and deposit a body on a curb. A little known fact about police precincts: they typically have most of their on-duty, TRAINED officers dispatched around the city, rather than standing outside of the precinct, guns drawn, ready for a random body drop.

It's also just across from a Rainbow Foods where a second man, wounded in the same apparent drug shoot-em-up, was deposited by the same carload of comrades. Maybe the hospital was too far away, or no one had a quarter for a meter. Maybe no one could remember how to dial 911. Maybe they just didn't like bleeders in the back seat.

Or maybe, just MAYBE, the unwounded folks in the car, fresh off a botched drug shoot-em-up, were shit-assed freaked out of their minds, so rational thinking like "gee, maybe we should call 911 or go to a hospital," just wasn't in the cards.

This all happened next to the big Target store at Lake St. and Minnehaha Av., within eyeshot of the pretty new light-rail trains that float over Lake Street when they climb the man-made mountain of an overpass.

Again, what the hell is Nick whining about here? What do the light-rail trains have to do with ANYTHING? Should the trains somehow have intervened? Jumped their tracks and formed a protective barrier around the body? What the hell is Nick's point here?

Maybe Finley caught a glimpse of the new train after he was shot in an alley near St. Albert's Catholic Church, six blocks away, and someone gave him a last lift to the grocery.

I'm sure Finley's mind was probably on a lot of things during the shoot-out, but he probably could have cared less about the freaking new train. And apparently, Nick has some insight into the shoot-out the rest of us aren't privvy to. Who really knows what happened outside of the church except for those involved.

"The only thing that surprises me is that someone cared enough to drop him off and try to get him some help," Suzanne Roberts said Thursday as she left the grocery store with a bag of fresh rolls and crossed the yellow hash marks where Finley had been on his back the night before. "What once was shocking is no longer shocking."

Who says people weren't shocked? Coleman paints a picture here that would indicate that people just gave Finley's body a dismissive sneer on their way into and out of the store. Seriously, once the police had arrived and cordoned off the area, were people supposed to just stand around, mouths agape in shock? If you weren't there for the actual body dumping, and the immediate ensuing confusion, why the hell would you feel compelled to be shocked?

Roberts, 56, belongs to the Midtown Phillips Neighborhood Association. She says the disturbing thing about a bleeder in front of your grocery is that no one seems disturbed.

Right, because, again, people should continue to be disturbed even if they didn't actually witness the event. You know, it also occurs to me that a person can simultaneously be disturbed and still shop. They can purchase food for their family and still ponder the unfortunate event that occurred earlier in the day. It's as if Nick expects everyone to see the police tape and fall to their knees yelling "Why, God, why?!!!" Whatever.

"We are desensitized," she said. "We have a proliferation of guns and the infrastructure of our community is breaking down. The police can't do everything, and it's like the Wild, Wild West. What used to be surprising doesn't surprise us anymore."

You know what? The police have NEVER been able to do everything, and one thing they most certainly can't do is predict when and where a random body drop is going to take place. Gotta get tha proliferation of guns canard in there, for good measure.

Inside the store, in the produce section, a woman named Janet was almost done filling eight large plastic sacks with unsalted peanuts at $1.49 a pound. She was shopping for an elderly lady who pays her to get her groceries and load up on peanuts, which the woman feeds to the squirrels.

Janet did not know about the 20-year-old man who had been dumped in the parking lot, shot in the chest.

Because, according to Nick's informed world as a FREAKIN' JOURNALIST, everyone in the Twin Cities should automatically just KNOW basically EVERYTHING. Back when I was a lad, my family took a vacation to Milwaukee, and we went down the very street Jeffrey Dahmer lived on, the same day, but hours before, he was arrested. We didn't know that Dahmer was busy eating his gay lovers. Damn us! When I see police tape today, I don't typically go running around to find out why the tape is there. It could be a car accident. It could be a shooting. It's really none of my concern. I can't necessarily do anything about the crime that already happened and is apparently being dealt with by police, so it's not really any of my concern.

"I'm not surprised," she said, scooping peanuts as she talked. "I live in the neighborhood and I know that kind of stuff happens around here. It's slowly going downhill. But right now I'm more worried about these peanuts. My arm is getting tired. When I go through check-out, they'll think I've got an elephant in my yard."

*sniff, sniff* I smell something rotten here, and what I smell is a made-up quote. That one doesn't work for me, Nick. First off, you don't give a second name to "Janet," which strikes me as incredibly odd, given that you gave the full name of Suzanne Roberts earlier. Second, it just plays too well into your upcoming segue. But, nevermind. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here.

No, Janet. It's Minneapolis that has an elephant in its yard.

See?

Minneapolis has become a place where kids get shot waiting at a stoplight in broad daylight or get shot near a church and dropped off at a grocery store to die and there is no outrage.

Yep. Happens every day. On the minute, actually. It happens with such regularity, the train schedule seems laughable by comparison. Day in and day out, there's a steady stream of body drops and stoplight shootings. And with Nick, it's the lack of outrage that's the most galling. People should be out in the streets, slicing the name "Finley" in their chests in blinding outrage. How dare you people have the audacity to go about your daily lives when you should be out and about voicing your outrage! Because outrage solves EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD.

Here in Rochester, in 1999, the decapitated bodies of a woman and young man were found in garbage bags in a ditch just outside of town. Let me tell you, the outrage here in Rochester was pretty intense, and it still took two years to finger the likely killer who, living in Bangladesh, is beyond the reach of law enforcement. Such a valuable tool, outrage.

"It's getting to the point where it's almost normal," said Lyle Solie, a retired truck driver who was in the frozen foods section. "I hate to say that, but you know how it is. Anyway, they say it wasn't random. They say it's drug-related, and you know how that business is. I forget about it when they say it's drug related."

That, of course, sets up the next big "person-on-the-street" encounter.

Over in the dairy section, Darlene Smith wasn't comforted to hear that a shooting "wasn't random." She is a 50-year-old secretary and she has a 13-year-old whose comings and goings she worries about. To her, there is no reassurance in labeling the death of some mother's son as "not random." Murder doesn't always stay inside neat lines. "Not random" is just a way of pretending a dead kid deserved it.

That's a nice leap of logic there. It's totally incorrect, but it's a nice leap all the same. Just shooting from the hip here, but maybe, "not random" means that a dangerous drug deal went down six blocks away and, although the youth's death is tragic and not deserved, that still doesn't excuse the fact that the youth was participating in an inherently DANGEROUS DRUG DEAL. "Not random" means he wasn't just picked off for the heck of it while on his way to law school. It means he was participating in an inherently DANGEROUS DRUG DEAL.

"It wasn't a random thing," Smith said with anger in her voice. "So what? Should we not do something?

Cue the outrage.

"That's the first thing the police always throw out there: 'It wasn't random. It was somebody who knew somebody.' Is that supposed to make us feel safe?

Well, it should make you feel a little safer knowing that you're probably not going to be a random target, unless you happen to participating in, oh, I don't know. . . an inherently DANGEROUS DRUG DEAL.

Whether it's random or not, it shouldn't be happening. The thing that kills me about this one is I'm looking across the parking lot and looking right at the police station. That's boldness, to do this right across from the police. It's almost like they are saying, 'We don't care where we get you and we'll dump you wherever we want to.'

There you go. The fact that a drug deal went down and people were shot and dumped on the curb is the fault of the police, rather than the the people who participated in the inherently DANGEROUS DRUG DEAL. Argh. It's enough to make the brain wobble.

"I feel like our town has been tainted."

Outside in the parking lot, right over the spot where Tremaine Finley bled, a City of Lakes street truck pulled up, and the driver got out to go into the grocery and buy a snack. That left a guy named Bruce resting in the passenger's seat, listening to a right-wing blowhard on the radio.

How's that for exposing some bias? Right-wing blowhard? Jeez. This column has a little of everything, except for a point, of course.

"Hey," I said. "You're parked right on the spot where that kid who got shot was left to die last night."

Because, you know, that's hallowed ground now. They should put up a fountain, with elaborate benches spaced around it that spell out "Tremane Finley." I envision Nick standing vigil on that spot for the next week or so, mumbling to himself about the lack of outrage.

"Geez," he said. "Really? And this was just last night, huh?

"Wow. That's tragic."

Yes, yes it was tragic. But, then again, so was Nick's column.

UPDATE: As this story has developed, it's come to light that Finley was shot during a botched carjacking. The car was Finley's mother's, and Finley was, in all liklihood, an innocent guy who was in the wrong place, in the wrong car, at the wrong time.

None of this, of course, make's Nick's column any less pathetic.

Posted by Ryan at November 19, 2004 01:15 PM | TrackBack