Not Again!
North Carolina Cops Claim Handcuffed Teen Committed Suicide
by Carl Dix | January 27, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Yes again. Cops in Durham, North Carolina, claim that Jesus Huerta committed suicide on November 19, 2013, by shooting himself while his hands were cuffed behind his back in the back seat of a police car. The fatal shot traveled up thru the front of Huerta's jacket, struck him in the mouth, and lodged in the roof of the police car. Huerta's dead body ended up slumped on the back seat of the police car with his hands still cuffed behind his back! They made this claim despite the fact that Huerta had been searched by a cop before he was placed in the police car.
In explaining how this could have happened, police chief Jose Lopez said: "I know that it is hard for people not in law enforcement to understand how someone could be capable of shooting themselves while handcuffed behind the back... While incidents like this are not common, they unfortunately have happened in other jurisdictions in the past." Lopez was referring to claims of police in Arkansas that Chavis Carter, a young Black man who had been searched twice and placed in a police car with his hands cuffed behind his back, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head on August 6, 2012. Lopez also said the cop who searched Huerta was a rookie and must have missed the gun.
Yes, it is damned hard to understand how this could happen. And it's just as hard, if not harder, to believe this story! Are they telling us that, since cops in Arkansas claimed someone who had been searched by a cop could produce a gun and shoot himself in the head with his hands cuffed behind his back, we should believe that Huerta had done the same? And because the cop who had searched Huerta was a rookie we should believe that Huerta had a gun on him that the cop didn't find?
It's very, very unlikely that either Huerta or Carter committed suicide. But even if the authorities are telling the truth about how they died, their blood is still on the hands of the capitalist system. Jesus Huerta's family called 911 because they had concerns about his mental condition and were considering having him committed. Yet when the police confronted him, they arrested him and treated him like a criminal, not a youth who was at risk. And what does it say about the situation of youth under this system and the future it offers them if either of these young men had been driven to such a state of desperation that they would take their own life?
After the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, a lotta Black youth cried out: "They're killing us!" These cries expressed a cold, ugly truth about the reality Black and Latino youth face today. A bulls-eye has been placed on their backs.
This is unacceptable. It must be stopped! A system that exonerates the killers of unarmed innocent Black and Latino people again and again is illegitimate and just no damned good. It needs to be done away with. It'll take revolution, nothing less, to stop this and all the other horrors this system inflicts on people, once and for all. Everyone who has had it with the way this system is breaking the bodies and crushing the spirits of tens of millions of people, everyone who wants to see a different future for inner city youth and for all of humanity, needs to get with the movement for revolution we are building with the Revolutionary Communist Party as its leading core.
And mass, determined resistance is needed right now to take on the attacks this system's criminal "injustice" system is bringing down on people. Everybody who has an ounce of justice in their hearts needs to come together and say NO MORE to all these horrors. No More to police murders! No More to people ending up dead in police custody like Jesus Huerta and Chavis Carter! No More to torture in prison! No More to mass incarceration and all its consequences!
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.