Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the death of his friend and former classmate at Howard, Prince Jones. Jones had been shot during a stop by an undercover narcotics officer on September 1, 2000. The officer, Cpl. Carlton B. Jones had followed Prince C. Jones Jr. from Chillum to Fairfax, Maryland. He then fired sixteen shots at the jeep in which the victim had been sitting, hitting him eight times. Five of the shots hit Prince Jones in the back. A jury would find the officer "negligent" but had also insisted that Prince Jones "contributed to his death by his actions during the fatal encounter." In the end, the cop kept his job.
The death of his friend, which had occurred ten days before the 9/11 attacks, was deeply disturbing to Coates. He writes of being unable to identify with the grief and fear that had overtaken New York City—indeed, the nation. He found it difficult to identify with the lives that had been lost in the attacks when he believed that the nation could not identify with the deaths of people like Prince Jones, and that they could determine such a death to be justifiable when Jones had been unarmed. Furthermore, Jones had been a law-abiding citizen, an excellent student, and a resident of a Prince George, Maryland suburb. He and his family had conducted themselves in the manner in which white America determines respectable, and he was still murdered.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/03/a-little-more-on-prince-jones/6967/
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