Last night, I Googled Jessie Hernandez after a friend reached out for support in the aftermath of her shooting. I’d been out of the loop for a few days and was stunned to read about the killing which took place while I was safely asleep in my bed just a few miles away early Monday morning.
Before I even finished reading the first article on Jessie’s death, I felt sick. First at the sheer tragedy of Jessie’s loss, and then with the knowledge that some news outlets will report on the shooting with a finger pointed at the now-dead sixteen year-old Latina, simply because she was driving a stolen car.
After reading about what happened, I left the seminar I’d been helping out with, found a secluded spot on a curb in a nearby parking lot, and beneath the half moon, began to wail. I cried until my eyes burned, until my head hurt, until my throat was full and my heart empty. I cried in sadness and sickness and rage. I cried because this keeps happening, I cried at the injustice and fucked up-ness of it all. I cried because I was terrified, because in that moment, Jessie was Sadies, Jessie was every teen I work with at CYAR, every teen who is out there just trying to Be in this world. And in all the crying, I actually got for perhaps the first time a real glimpse at the shock and despair hitting the families and friends of youth killed by law enforcement all across the country.
I’m not here to be right, to make a point, or change anyone’s mind. Right now, I’m here to grieve, and to do it in the only way I know how: By pouring what’s on my heart into words and praying with everything in me that none of this is for nothing.
I hardly claim to know all the facts of this tragic loss, nor do I consider myself in any way an authority on the experience of youth in the criminal injustice system.
But I have to ask: Who doesn’t do “irresponsible,” illegal or dangerous shit when they’re sixteen, and how many of us are killed for it? Sure, maybe there are some “good apples” out there–whatever the hell that means–but let’s face it: Even if we weren’t out driving around in stolen cars, we were doing our own version of being sixteen. Me? I was too busy slicing my arms and puking up dinner to be bothered with breaking the law (at that age anyway; 19-23 were a different story), though I hardly think that’s any less destructive, “irresponsible” or dangerous than shoplifting, trespassing or petty crime. But I was never going to be shot for the behaviors I engaged in. No, I was just “being sixteen.”
Right now, my community is hurting. Jessie Hernandez’s family is hurting. Her friends—including the ones who had to watch in horror as the cops pulled her lifeless body from the car—are hurting, and they are hurting in ways few of us will ever really understand. I don’t care how far removed someone is from this tragedy, it is absurd and infuriating for anyone to suggest that these kids “had it coming.”
See, for a single person to sit around justifying her death by citing her actions at the time of being shot is to completely dismiss her ALIVENESS as insignificant. It’s to make her LIFE not matter. White people: You wonder why movements like Black Lives Matter are “a thing”? Why we can’t just say All Lives Matter? This is why. It’s because, frankly, whiteness grants an automatic level of significance, an innocence, a benefit of the doubt that, by and large, minorities in this country simply do not have the luxury of being granted. This includes a “pass” to make the kind of arguably reckless choices we all make, the kind of choices that get kids like Jessie Hernandez shot and killed. By police officers.
(Lest anyone get wrapped up in defending the cops by the way, consider that right now, they’re the ones who least need your concern or defense. The officers in these killings still have their freedom. They still have their jobs. The injured officer who opened fire still has his leg. Jessie Hernandez lost her life. I’m not saying police officers’ lives, feelings, families and reputations “don’t matter.” I am saying that they have an entire system defending their choices, granting them the compassion and benefit of the doubt that is too often denied the victims. Right now is the time to hold the space for their feelings, their reputations, their families, and their lives.)
I got the chance to grow up, to learn from my mistakes, and to create a life so blissfully unlike the one I saw laid out before me when I was Jessie’s age. I was able to take the lessons from my youth and use them to fuel a future brighter than I could have ever imagined. I was lucky. And I was also white.
My path looked little like that of Jessie Hernandez. But my heart is broken open for her, for everything this world lost when those cops opened fire. For all that is no longer breathing in her lungs, beating in her chest, and growing possible through the lived experience of her youth.
I know the things I did as a teenager are part of what’s made me the strong, brilliant, compassionate, driven woman I am today. My mistakes and missteps taught me, they shaped me, they informed my world. And as painful as many of those lessons were for me and those closest to me, I wouldn’t take the first thing back.
How utterly heart-wrenching it is that Jessie will never have the chance to say the same.
The Sound of Heartstrings 