Remember the story in July of 2018 about the guy here in Florida who confronted a woman about parking in a handicapped spot at a convenience store and then shot her boyfriend when he came outside? I wrote about it HERE.
On Friday August 23, 2019, the man, Michael Drejka was convicted of manslaughter of Markeis McGlockton. He has yet to be sentenced, so the story is not over.
There are plenty of lessons here. Let’s deal focus on three:
First and foremost is that if you lay your hands on another man in anger, you might just end up dead. McGlockton acted violently – there is no disputing that. The surveillance video clearly shows him instigating the physical confrontation. For that, he paid with his life. I'm guessing it wasn't the first time that McGlockton acted violently. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
Right or wrong, justified or not, dying is always a possibility when you start a conversation with violence. No matter what Drejka did that day, McGlockton could have just called Drejka a bad name, gotten in his car and driven away. But he did not.
Second Lesson: If someone physically attacks you, you don’t get to kill them! I’m sure things in that parking lot happened pretty quickly for Drejka, and he may very well have felt threatened with bodily harm by a man who was obviously quite younger and bigger than he was (but who was not brandishing a weapon at that point). So did Drejka have a reasonable, genuine fear that his life was in danger? Ehhhh, the jury did not think so. You certainly can get your ass kicked. (Some people deserve it!) But that doesn’t give you, the ass-kickee permission to kill the ass-kicker.
Third Lesson: The media sucks. Most stories that I've read, including THIS one from Reuters erroneously state that this case was a study in Florida's so-called "Stand Your Ground" law. The reality is that Drejka's attorneys went for simple self-defense and did not invoke "Stand Your Ground." But the media has an agenda that apparently has nothing to do with the truth.
Okay, anyway, Drejka was found guilty and he will be sentenced at some later date. He may face some jail time, or he might not. This is Florida, after all. But whatever sentence is handed down, it most likely won’t be Life Without Parole. Eventually, he’ll go on with his life. McGlockton is still dead. I wouldn't want to be either of those two guys.
There are no winners here.
Who Am I?
- Bob Barbanes:
- A nobody; a nitwit; a pilot; a motorcyclist; a raconteur; a lover...of life - who loves to laugh, who tries to not take myself (or anything) too seriously...just a normal guy who knows his place in the universe by being in touch with my spiritual side. What more is there?
3 comments:
I've already been in many situations where I have thought to myself, just let it be because the other person probably is packing a gun. I once had to fire a real redneck of a guy and he took it personally. I spent the better part of a couple weeks looking over my shoulder on that one. Sucks that the world has come to this.
I remember back when you posted about this originally being conflicted about it all but I don't think I ever saw the video of the incident. Now I have seen the video more times than I can count on the evening news, I think the right sentence was handed down. If the man had just pulled his gun and aimed, the whole thing probably would have ended there. It looked to me like the guy who pushed him down saw the gun and was backing up when he got shot. Had he thought that the guy he was going to push violently backwards had a gun and reconsidered his actions, he might still be alive. Like you said, there were no winners.
Trouble is, Ed, you cannot pull your gun out just as a warning. What they teach us in the class you are required to take before getting a concealed-carry permit is that you're supposed to only pull your gun if you feel that your life is genuinely in danger - and then shoot to neutralize the threat! Don't fire it into the air or ground, and don't fire a "warning" shot. If you really think your life (or the life of another person) is in danger, shoot to kill. It's grim, but if we think about it, it's the truth. If one cannot deal with that reality, then they probably should not own and carry a gun.
On the other hand! If you pull out and wave your gun around like Dirty Harry, the cops can and will arrest you.
What happened to Markeis McGlockton in Tampa is nothing new and doesn't really point to any change in our culture. In the American Old West, nearly everyone carried a firearm of some sort, right? We can imagine (because none of us were there) that most people were generally pretty polite back then, and didn't go around body-slamming others because of a simple verbal argument. To think that people of the Old West were more "civilized" and gentlemanly than they are today is pure fantasy. How cranky and easily pissed-off would you be if you lived in ungodly-hot west Texas in the summertime and had to poop in a damn outhouse with no toilet paper? Heh, I'd be shooting people for just looking at me cross-eyed as we passed on the street!
And like in every society going back to Cain and Abel, there had to have been "bad people" around in the Old West - bullies or those with no moral compass. And without the kind of ubiquitous law enforcement we have these days, I'm sure that those bad people felt as though they could act with impunity - kind of like McGlockton did. And I'm equally sure they suffered the same fate as he.
So it will be interesting to see what sentence Drejka gets! Don't worry, I'll be sure to post it here in this aviation-themed blog ;-)
You raise a very good point and as a person who loves to read history, I know that people were getting shot in arguments back then like today. I guess perhaps the difference is back then, life expectancy wasn't what it is today and it wasn't so abnormal for people to think they had a chance of getting shot by Buford Tannen over a matter of $80. (Back To the Future reference.) However, the chances of a middle aged white male getting shot is probably well down on the list of possible deaths for me and yet when I fired that guy, that fate occupied my mind for a couple weeks. Unfortunately, the odds of a black man in a city dying of a gun shot is much higher so it may have been no surprise to those close to Markeis McGlockton.
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