Brian
Floyd and Tom Wortham died two days ago. Today Brian’s
mother and Tom’s
father spoke out.
First,
Lucille Floyd: The Negro National League
played baseball just south of the parking lot for the current White Sox
ballpark. In 1946 the CHA removed the
9,000 seat grandstand and built the 422-unit
So we
know that Lucille has spent at least a decade living on welfare and
that she has managed to keep lease compliant.
She has said that her son and his cousin and two others went out on a
Wednesday night “to go drinking” – only one of the four was of drinking
age. When she learned they tried to
steal a motorcycle from an off-duty cop, she explained that it was just a game
of “dare” that motivated the gunpoint robbery.
NBC videotaped her in her lovely garden apartment:
But I don’t feel like all those guys have to pay
for that one mistake, you know. It was
all a mistake on everybody’s part including the people that shot and the ones
that died about it.
It was a big mistake so I feel like, you know, we
need to let it rest and let, you know, go on with our lives. The whole thing, you know, all this could
just end because there’s so much confusion and abuse about it – ‘cause it, it’s
really tearing me up. It really is. But by the grace of God, you know, and bein’ strong, and I’m holding on to what I got left, my two
kids I got left.
It was all a big mistake. It was on their part as
well as the officers who shot those children.
And for him to shoot them the way he did, in cold blood – because bein’ an officer, I feel like, he should have had a
knowledge of how to hit those children without killin’
them, but he instantly come out just to kill, it seem like to me, because he
hit ‘em up at the top.
Can you imagine yo’self
just sittin’ up there, shooting the brains out of a
young 20 year-old child? I mean, it,
it’s just disgraceful. I mean, he could’a hit ‘em in the legs or
the behind or something, just to keep him from moving so they could’a made a, arrested them or something, but no he
instantly comes out, starts shootin’ to kill and
that’s what threw the whole thing off.
It’s hard to raise these black young men as single
parents – all these kids that was involved there, they don’t have they fathers
with them, you know we
raisin’ these kids on our own.
Next,
the victim’s father:
"Know
this," the retired Chicago Police sergeant told the Chicago Sun-Times on
Friday, two days after his only son, Police Officer Thomas Wortham
IV, was gunned down in front of his
The
63-year-old's voice was not shaky. He did not weep. He spoke with stern
resolve.
"I
intend to start a movement to stop this violence," he said.
"We
need to get more people involved in these kids' lives," Wortham said. "This guy who shot my son, I want to
meet his father. Because, if he had a father like my son's father, this would
never have happened."
Englewood
District police Commander Keith Calloway says it
for me:
"I'm
truly at a loss to explain how someone gets killed playing a game. This is not PlayStation. There is no reset
button. How do you raise a child (so)
that they go out and play a game and kill somebody? It's irresponsible,
it's shameful, it's pathetic, and I hope they rot in
hell for it."
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