Brandon Lee on random MySpace profile
To the language and content sensitive: Don't go there.
UPDATED: Collectively, we're somewhere in between 19th Century notions of what a newspaper and journalism means and the 21st Century landscape of content immediacy and iterative reporting. There aren't road signs here. The editorial discomfort over posting this picture without further comment had more to do with context, and that thinking is correct. It wasn't well communicated, but it probably would help if the phone on my desk actually worked.
So here's the image purported to be Lee in a Du Roc Crips T-Shirt. It's not posted to be sensational or to "criminalize" the victim. Brandon should not be dead today. Period.
However the narrative regarding what is happening in Monrovia and unincorporated "No Man's Land" has its inconsistencies. One of those is the extent to which innocents or "innocents" are being caught in the crossfire. It's an uncomfortable, difficult-to-process space that someone like 16-year-old Sammantha Salas could be gunned down in front of her home through no fault of her own. And that someone might have considered her a target by association. Police and family, as per tomorrow's story, link her father to a checkered past.
I'll try to explore some of these things in tomorrow's story.
Brandon Lee was 19 and it confounds reason that he would be murdered. Except his own gang connection might have run more deeply than his family thought. More than the police -- who now say they believe he was a full-fledged member of the DuRoc Crips -- other, more personal connections make that link, including the content of his makeshift memorial at the site of his murder. And at some point, he stood and posed for this picture. Does it tell the complete story of Brandon Lee? No, but it can't be ignored either and illustrates another facet.
By noon was down at the crime scene where Brandon Lee was killed Tuesday night where Brandon's father Willie Lee was sobbing and embracing Jeanette Chavez, mother of 16-year-old Sammantha Salas killed Saturday night. Incomparable Star-News photographer Walt Mancini took this picture as they sat, rocking and crying, a marked bullet hole over their shoulder.