How would you know?
He couldn’t know if she was raised well, however, we can surmise that she made some very poor choices. If she were taught well, she ignored those teachings for sure. Thought she could jump in and jump out when she felt like it. She learned the hard way that playing with fire more than not gets you burned to some degree or other. In her case it turned out to be a 98 percent reality. Truly a shame no matter how you look at it.
Not many well-raised kids have a dad and brother busted for dealing in meth.
The article paints an overall picture of an area so overrun with gang culture that people had gotten used to it. Complacency. Jessica supposedly was going to write a book about how she survived her brush with gang culture. So she knew too much. Plus her dad was, despite his meth bust, allowed to work for the police dept. Not an officer, some sort of maintenance activity. So Jessica was the most natural target for a racial revenge crime.
My dad was a principal in a south side high school in Chicago, had a lot of first had experience with the degeneration of black inner city culture. He had a program that was working to find kids who wanted out and got them on an academic track that helped them escape. But the program was shut down by the original Mayor Daley, working with Jesse Jackson. JJ sat in my dad’s office and told him to his face he was the wrong color for the job.
So there’s a monstrous evil at work here. I’m not convinced it’s right to blame a young lady for the home and town she’s born into. Yes, she could have made better choices. Maybe when she was five she could have run away from home. But the fact remains she was trying to get it right, even after all she’d been through. I am impressed with that. It takes courage, and the rare ability to see beyond one’s immediate circumstances. I am very sorry it didn’t work out for her.
But the people who did this to her are to blame for her death. Not her. It’s cutting them an excuse to be feral if we blame the victim. It serves their purpose. That’s what gangs want. Fear and avoidance. We give them that, and they’ve got from us what they want. We become victims by extension, just like they want. What they don’t want is to be held to account. One way or another, that’s what’s got to happen. We have no choice. We can all be Jessica Chambers now, by choice, or we will all end up being Jessica Chambers later, whether we like it or not.