WS Chronicle

Does anyone remember Aug. 26, 2015? Does anyone remember that Officer Randall Kerrick of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department fatally shot Jonathan Ferrell on Sept. 14, 2013?Does anyone remember that on Aug. 26, 2015, Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office decided not to retry Kerrick after his voluntary manslaughter trial ended in a mistrial?

We have new names instead of Kerrick and Ferrell to use now.  Another black man has been shot dead in Charlotte. The black man is now Keith Lamont Scott and the police officer who killed him is Police Officer Brentley Vinson.

Scott was fatally shot on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, as he waited for his son to arrive from school on the school bus.”

Back in 2015, the names Ferrell and Kerrick were the names that made the blood of people in Charlotte boil. They protested on Aug. 21, 2015, too, when the mistrial was announced. They confronted police, too. In a little over a year later, people in Charlotte are letting it be known that the police have not learned from Jonathan Ferrell’s death. Police still shoot first and maybe ask questions later.

We are hearing it again. “No justice, no peace.” Cooper is running for governor on a record that includes allowing injustice to rule in the lives of black men wrongly accused (Kalvin Michael Smith) and in the lives of families of black men wrongly shot dead. Is he waiting to become governor to right the wrongs in those cases?

Police said Ferrell charged at them, that’s why they killed him.

Police said Scott had a gun and looked threatening with it in his hand. That’s why he had to die.

Others refute those claims an article in The Charlotte

Observer dated Aug. 21, 2015, Ferrell’s mother, Georgia Ferrell of Tallahassee, Fla. said: “We’ve got to stop them from killing our children.”

The other issue is, we’ve got to get justice for our dead brothers or we’ll keep hearing it: “No justice, no peace.”