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We all are at fault in death of 8-year-old

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Steve Otto

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: April 7, 2009

What does an 8-year-old girl have to worry about?

Maybe I'm thinking about a different time, a world that seems to be fading into memory, when children were just that.

Maybe it was a Norman Rockwell vision of a world that never really was. It was a world when young girls slipped from the wondrous fantasies of childhood into a realization that there are other things to experience.

It should be a magical time as parents watch their daughters blossom with new insights every day. My wife teaches third-graders, many of whom just have turned from 8 to 9 and who are a delight to be around as they experience life through eyes not dimmed with the disappointments of age.

Last week, Paris Whitehead-Hamilton was one of those girls. If you look at the photograph we ran of her, she has her gorgeous, almost impish face cupped in her hands. In those dark eyes there is that spirit and energy that is ready to do anything. You look at that picture and you want to bring her presents when you come home from work or put her on your shoulder and run outside in the sunshine and show her what can be.

This shouldn't happen

Eight-year-old girls should not die. They should not be butchered at 2 o'clock in the morning in their own homes by a hailstorm of bullets that riddle a house and rip into a little girl terrified and running toward a back room for cover.

What kind of a world is it that we allow these sorts of things to occur, with what happened to little Paris hardly being an isolated incident?

The slaying happened near Bartlett Park in a south St. Petersburg neighborhood. I remember going to the Bartlett Park tennis center years ago and watching people like Chris Evert and Billie Jean King on lazy, sunny days. It was a quieter, older neighborhood. Since then, it has changed.

Now, people are armed to the teeth. Now, the newspapers print police reports of violence and stories of deteriorating neighborhoods.

Now, 8-year-old girls get slaughtered at 2 o'clock in the morning in their own homes.

'The man' is outraged

St. Petersburg's police chief, Charles "Chuck" Harmon, says he is outraged and is not going to tolerate it anymore.

Well, the chief might be outraged, but if you think this is not going to happen again, you've been getting your news from "Wheel of Fortune."

It is going to happen again in St. Petersburg, in Tampa, in Plant City, in Clearwater or in another community near here. It is the world of violence and fear we have created.

According to police reports, the shooting was an act of retribution that had nothing to do with the little girl, of course.

It had to do with people who happen to carry semiautomatic assault rifles and shotguns in their cars. People who pack bulletproof vests like you might a jacket in case it gets cold.

Maybe you can look into the eyes of Paris for a few seconds and then move on. We've had to deal with so many acts of seemingly random violence that it is difficult to remember all the faces.

But it is becoming more evident that we cannot call these incidents "random acts of violence" in a world where violence no longer is random but is part of our way of life.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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