‘Just to confirm: self-inflicted?’ a police dispatcher asks, to which a voice replies, ‘Self-inflicted’

After fatally shooting an unarmed Black woman who called 911 to report what she thought was a prowler outside her Illinois home, police claimed her death was in fact self-inflicted, according to the victim’s family and dispatch audio from the incident.

Police at first told hospital staff that Sonya Massey, 36, had died by suicide, Jimmie Crawford Jr., the father of Massey’s daughter, said Tuesday at a press conference organized by civil rights attorney Ben Crump. At the same time, officers told Crawford that a neighbor had been responsible for Massey’s killing, he said. Massey’s son said police told him that his mother “had been shot in the eye and it came out her neck.”

“They didn’t tell me who,” Malachi Hill Massey, 17, said on Tuesday. “They were just saying [it was] ‘somebody.’”

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The manner of death is for the living, not the person you want dead. It’s to remove that person from society and to take their life away. That’s literally the most you can do directly to that person. There’s nothing you can do to them afterwards that will mean anything to them.

      If you want to torture someone and then end their life, that’s also for the living. Your desire to inflict revenge, pain, suffering, and trauma on the perpetrator. Your need to see it done. Because once they’re dead they don’t care, every bit of pain you inflicted on them is gone, so the revenge is for you. You get to carry whatever…satisfaction…there is from that torture with you.

      So the answer isn’t that “a quick death is too good for some people”, it’s that it’s not good enough for you.

    • TheFlopster@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I agree with you that some people don’t deserve a quick death.

      But I don’t think it should be government sanctioned or within the prison system, because they get it wrong all the time, and the innocent suffer.

      • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        I’m with you on that 100%. I don’t trust the government to make any decisions and the US prison system is already corrupt and abusive to begin with.

        But I think for example, a father that gets ahold of the rapist who kept his daughter in a basement for several years… He’s getting a free pass from me.

      • lemonmelon@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Hold up…

        You’re wrong to wish such torture upon anyone for any reason, no matter what they’ve done.

        You should be raped and stabbed until you understand why you’re wrong.

          • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            Because they’re still someone. You can’t take a hard line moralist approach and abandon it as soon as it’s inconvenient.

            No one should suffer these things, not the vilest of criminals, or the idiots who think they should.

            • Pfifel@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              I’m not saying I agree with him, but this is the parafox of tolerance. If you tolerate the intolerant, intolerance wins out and the tolerant are eliminated.

              • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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                5 months ago

                I have long thought the paradox of intolerance was bullshit, largely spouted by those who don’t want to put in the effort to actually understand the humanity of the other. The easiest example I can show that pretty handily disproves the paradox of tolerance is Daryl Davis, the black blues musician who befriended and converted many KKK members, including high-ranking people, simply by talking and tolerating them.

                Note that you can tolerate the human without tolerating the actions. Actions can be good or bad, people are just people, each as capable of great good as they are great evil, and the only way to actually crush intolerable ideals is by connecting with the human inside.

                I don’t think anyone has an obligation to this. Be safe and true to you, but for those who CAN, hiding behind a paradox IS intolerable.

              • lemonmelon@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                This is absolutely not equivalent to the paradox of intolerance. Taking the stance of “you’re wrong to wish such torture upon anyone for any reason” almost immediately before wishing such torture upon someone is, by even the most generous interpretation, blatant hypocrisy.

                • Pfifel@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  I mean the paradox basically states if you want to stay a tolerant society you should be intolerant to the intolerant, which is a paradox.

                  And here’s a man claiming to be tolerant, being intolerant to an intolerant person.

                  And yes his statement is indeed hypocritical: “noone should suffer this except you”. But you know… the tolerant society being intolerant is also hypocrisy.