Baby shower turns lethal

From The Washington Post:

It was a beautiful party. There were baby bibs, a crib, booties and the usual silly shower games. Jerrod A. Falls was about to be an uncle. No one suspected that Saturday night's happy occasion would end in a hail of bullets and Falls lying dead in the parking lot.

Prince George's County police are investigating the circumstances of the shooting that killed Falls, 31, and injured his girlfriend. But police and family members say Falls was shot by an acquaintance as family members were leaving the baby shower for Falls's sister.

Yesterday, police issued an arrest warrant for a suspect in the shooting: Eric Dixon of the 7100 block of Greeley Road in the Hyattsville area. Attempts to reach Dixon by phone were unsuccessful.

Police said the trouble started about 7 p.m. when 40 to 50 family members began leaving Jeriesha Falls's baby shower at Woodlawn Recreation Center in the Landover Hills area. Jerrod Falls was talking with his uncle and a couple of other men in the parking lot near the 6900 block of Greenvale Parkway when an argument erupted between Falls and Dixon, Falls's girlfriend's brother.

"Jerrod was trying to walk away. He was telling the boy, 'Please don't do that in front of my family,' " recalled Ronlicia Gordon-Falls, a cousin of Falls's.

In seconds, the friendly family get-together turned violent when Dixon, 25, pushed Falls in the chest, the cousin recalled. As the two men argued, a young child standing nearby ran from the parking lot into the street. When Dixon chased the boy down and then roughly yanked him out of the street, Falls became upset, and the two exchanged more heated words, Gordon-Falls recalled.

"They started shouting at each other," she said. "Then [Dixon] pulled out a gun."

Family members scattered as Dixon began chasing Falls. In the midst of the panic, Gordon-Falls, 17, began screaming, and Dixon turned the gun on her and started shooting, she said. Her cousin sprinted toward her, telling her to take cover behind a car. The shots kept coming, she said. "He was shooting everywhere. Bullets were flying."

Falls collapsed on the pavement after Dixon shot him in the back, Gordon-Falls said. Then, she said, she saw Dixon standing over her cousin and firing rounds into him with a large, black handgun. "When Jerrod sat up, that boy went right up to him and started shooting into him right on the ground," Gordon-Falls said.

She said family members briefly wrestled with Dixon before he broke loose and fled.

What good purpose is served by omitting any reference to the race of the people involved in this tragedy?

I have two good friends, a pair of sisters, who are due to have babies next month. I have absolutely no fear that someone will start throwing shots at their baby shower next week. But then they are married, white and middle class.

Read what Tony Blair said about conditions in the UK:

What we are dealing with is not a general social disorder; but specific groups or people who for one reason or another, are deciding not to abide by the same code of conduct as the rest of us. This came home to me when, at the recent summit I held on knife and gun crime, the black Pastor of a London church said bluntly: when are we going to start saying this is a problem amongst a section of the black community and not, for reasons of political correctness, pretend that this is nothing to do with it.

Does anyone doubt that that isn't even more true about the United States?

The fact is that if you strip the crime commited by blacks out of the US staticists we have a crime rate lower than Canada. America's crime problem is a race problem and it will not be solved until it is addressed in that way.