They partied with him earlier in the year.
Then authorities claim they came back to burglarize his home.
…And, they killed him.
Four suspects in the death of National Football League star Sean Taylor are pictured in these Miami-Dade Police Department photographs released on November 30, 2007. The suspects (clockwise from top L), Venjah K. Hunte, Eic Rivera, Jr., Charles Kendrick Lee Wardlow and Jason Scott Mitchell, were arrested in Florida and murder charges are expected in the case, police said on Friday night. Taylor, 24, of the Washington Redskins was shot in the groin area during an apparent home robbery on Monday, severing his femoral artery, and he died the next day in a hospital after losing massive amounts of blood. (Miami-Dade Police Department/Reuters)
Brutally Honest passed on the latest hard-hitting piece by Jason Whitlock a sports writer at the Kansas City Star. This week Whitlock discussed the tragic death of Sean Taylor who was gunned down in his home last week by four burglars who also happened to be at one of his parties earlier this year.
Taylor’s death a grim reminder for us all
There’s a reason I call them the Black KKK. The pain, the fear and the destruction are all the same.
Someone who loved Sean Taylor is crying right now. The life they knew has been destroyed, an 18-month-old baby lost her father, and, if you’re a black man living in America, you’ve been reminded once again that your life is in constant jeopardy of violent death.
The Black KKK claimed another victim, a high-profile professional football player with a checkered past this time.
When the traditional, white KKK lynched, terrorized and intimidated black folks at a slower rate than its modern-day dark-skinned replacement, at least we had the good sense to be outraged and in no mood to contemplate rationalizations or be fooled by distractions.
Our new millennium strategy is to pray the Black KKK goes away or ignores us. How’s that working?
About as well as the attempt to shift attention away from this uniquely African-American crisis by focusing on an “injustice” the white media allegedly perpetrated against Sean Taylor.
No disrespect to Taylor, but he controlled the way he would be remembered by the way he lived. His immature, undisciplined behavior with his employer, his run-ins with law enforcement, which included allegedly threatening a man with a loaded gun, and the fact a vehicle he owned was once sprayed with bullets are all pertinent details when you’ve been murdered.
Marcellus Wiley, a former NFL player, made the radio circuit Wednesday, singing the tune that athletes are targets. That was his explanation for the murders of Taylor and Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams and the armed robberies of NBA players Antoine Walker and Eddy Curry.
Really?
Let’s cut through the bull(manure) and deal with reality. Black men are targets of black men. Period. Go check the coroner’s office and talk with a police detective. These bullets aren’t checking W-2s.
Rather than whine about white folks’ insensitivity or reserve a special place of sorrow for rich athletes, we’d be better served mustering the kind of outrage and courage it took in the 1950s and 1960s to stop the white KKK from hanging black men from trees.
But we don’t want to deal with ourselves. We take great joy in prescribing medicine to cure the hate in other people’s hearts. Meanwhile, our self-hatred, on full display for the world to see, remains untreated, undiagnosed and unrepentant.
Read the whole thing HERE.
