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You could argue, effectively, that many of the people who commit this kind of crime are the products of a process that begins when they are children, in broken, impoverished homes and underperforming schools.>

Couldn't have said it better myself.

While it's a national problem, I wish Greensboro and it's black leaders would spend their time and efforts - ALL their time and efforts - on educating, motivating and measuring the black community on the very basics of building better lives for themselves. Stable homes, hours of homework every night, working hard, being respectful and humble, etc.

Many people have done it - many that couldn't even speak our language, which makes it so much harder.
They were willing to sacrifice generations to make it better for their future generations.

Unfortunately it's a prayer group hear and there, a walk to stop the violence once or twice a year, or a quick editorial statement once in a blue moon.
Then it's back to armed robberies, killings and playing the victim and racism cards.

Allen,

Well said and I, also, agree with you 100%. I'll go a little beyond the previous poster - the Black leadership of this city should publicly condemn the actions immediately. The only time we see them publicly condemning anything is when they view the black community is being victimized.

Deena Hayes, Skip Alston, Rev. Johnson, etc. should stand in front of the city hall today and condemn this.

As I recall, a security guard was shot and wounded at Carlyle's Jewelers in Friendly Center during a robbery several years ago.
I guess robbers go where the money is.

*You could argue, effectively, that many of the people who commit this kind of crime are the products of a process that begins when they are children, in broken, impoverished homes and underperforming schools.

But this does not excuse what happened Monday. Nothing does.*@Allen

Allen: Institutional racism and excuses based on race and poverty are dead. A black man went from welfare to the White House. It is finished.

My heart breaks too when I hear of another black youth lost to the lure of easy money and criminal behavior. But the onus is now squarely on the individual for their choices.

Prison is for those who make violent choices. Prison is where they belong.

Mr. Johnson, I think what you are saying that the people who grew up in my neighbor hood, should be running around committing crimes?
We grew up with no electricity, no in door plumbing, walked to school. I no of none of us that committed a crime! Could it be, we were made to work. Got our butts kicked if we acted up in school. ( both at school and home).
Do this now and a social worker, would have the teacher fired and the parents in jail.
Of course now it always someone else fault.

This is truly heartbreaking all the way around.

Doug and others: As I wrote, there is no excuse.

Murder is murder.

I do, however, believe that the solution to the crime problem isn't simply to lock more and people up. That's what we're doing now and it isn't working.

We've got to invest in prevention on the front end, too, especially in education.

What Jeff Sykes said.

"Murder is murder." Perhaps the solution in cases like this is not just "locking more people up" - i.e. free room and board for the rest of their lives (after a ten-year legal circus that will no doubt offer up all of the sorry excuses you did in this post).

Investing in "prevention" is a noble idea (albeit hard to implement given that no one these days is responsible for their own choices). But perhaps the societal solution (once the evil deed is done) should be "an eye for an eye".

Perhaps we've become too "enlightened" for our own good.

I personally oppose the death penalty but it is hard to argue against it in a case such as this one.

Then again, in some other cases involving heinous crimes the people who were caught and sentenced turned out to be the wrong people.

Within the past week I had conversations with two diverse (economically and racially) people regarding the Brinks killing in particular and violent crime in general.

I mentioned to a woman that in very early written reports on the Brinks killing someone present in the store was reported as saying that the killer was seen going into the women's restroom twice before the shooting. I stated that had I been in the store and witnessed that I would have reported it to a store employee and/or checked it out myself. The woman I was speaking with immediately said, "Oh, you have to be careful about reporting something like that -- he could be transgender."

What level have we fallen to when the possible health and safety of a child takes a back seat to possibly "offending" someone? My first and only concern was that a young girl may have gone to the women's restroom while he/she/it was in there. Harsh as it sounds, unless that man could prove that there were not even vestiges of three things dangling in front, he should have been removed from the women's bathroom and the store.

We can only hope that the GPD took (or at least attempted to take) fingerprints from the women's restroom.

The second conversation took place with a male. We were discussing recent crimes in Greensboro. He sought to blame the recent economic downturn and job losses. My question to him was, "So you think that the perpetrators have lost jobs in the past three or four months?" I went on to say that I doubted if the wrongdoers had EVER been productive for themselves, their families, or society at large. He thought about that for a minute and said, "It was probably drugs" and then agreed that the economic downturn this fall had probably not "forced" them into taking such illegal and horrendous actions.

Maybe, just maybe, the money source (enablers, e.g., family, society) the perpetrators had been leeching off of dried up, but that is probably the only connection between their actions and the economic downturn.

Too often we blame despicable acts by individuals on "the economic downturn."

Yes, the economy is bad and people are out of work. But there are millions of decent people looking for a job who never picked up a gun to rob someone or commit violence.

The perp in the Old Navy armed robbery and murder is a predator. He would have done this regardless of the economic conditions. He's a bad guy.

Let's stop with the lefty squish. Let's admit there are evil people in the world who will do harm because that's who they are.