Late last Saturday evening, a Baltimore Police detective and his buddy were trying to park near a club in the Canton area of town. You probably have a part of town like this where you live - formerly industrial, where old factories are transformed into condominia and old bakeries and pickle processing plants become bars and row houses that sold for $7,000 now go for $370,000, sold to people who want to live near these bars and condos and vie with others for parking spots.
The cop and his friend somehow, according to police officials, became embroiled in an argument over a parking spot with a man who, this past July, was arrested and freed on bail. Court records show he was charged in July with attempted rape, third-degree sex offense, assault and false imprisonment. He was released in mid-September on $150,000 bond. The alleging record also shows that in late July, he was ordered to stay away from a woman who had filed her second protective order against him in a span of four months.
So, allegedly, on Saturday night, he was trying to pull into a parking spot in which the detective had just parked, and he allegedly registered his displeasure by picking up a fist-sized piece of concrete and throwing it, hitting the officer in the head, killing him.
And then the man and his girlfriend parked somewhere else, and were arrested at another downtown club. That's what gets me. To him, it was as if he swatted a fly or squished a mosquito and then continued on his merry way. Allegedly.
We've become a society like that. Instead of throwing figurative rocks over where the president was born or who's a socialist or if it's ok for two men to be in love or where that guy working next door was born, how about you T. Partiers start worrying about a world in which people throw real rocks at each other's heads over a damned parking space? I think that's a bigger problem, allegedly.
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