‘Just to confirm: self-inflicted?’ a police dispatcher asks, to which a voice replies, ‘Self-inflicted’
After fatally shooting an unarmed Black woman who called 911 to report what she thought was a prowler outside her Illinois home, police claimed her death was in fact self-inflicted, according to the victim’s family and dispatch audio from the incident.
Police at first told hospital staff that Sonya Massey, 36, had died by suicide, Jimmie Crawford Jr., the father of Massey’s daughter, said Tuesday at a press conference organized by civil rights attorney Ben Crump. At the same time, officers told Crawford that a neighbor had been responsible for Massey’s killing, he said. Massey’s son said police told him that his mother “had been shot in the eye and it came out her neck.”
“They didn’t tell me who,” Malachi Hill Massey, 17, said on Tuesday. “They were just saying [it was] ‘somebody.’”
The manner of death is for the living, not the person you want dead. It’s to remove that person from society and to take their life away. That’s literally the most you can do directly to that person. There’s nothing you can do to them afterwards that will mean anything to them.
If you want to torture someone and then end their life, that’s also for the living. Your desire to inflict revenge, pain, suffering, and trauma on the perpetrator. Your need to see it done. Because once they’re dead they don’t care, every bit of pain you inflicted on them is gone, so the revenge is for you. You get to carry whatever…satisfaction…there is from that torture with you.
So the answer isn’t that “a quick death is too good for some people”, it’s that it’s not good enough for you.