Joined: Sat May 29, 2004 11:46 pm Posts: 14428 Location: NC
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What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America's middle class.— By Charlie LeDuff IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones, 25, was pacing, unable to sleep.
His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo'nay Stanley-Jones (PDF), slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, Television was watching them. A half-dozen masked officers of the Special Response Team—Detroit's version of SWAT—were at the door, guns drawn. In tow was an A&E crew filming an episode of The First 48, its true-crime program. The conceit of the show is that homicide detectives have 48 hours to crack a murder case before the trail goes cold. Thirty-four hours earlier, Je'Rean Blake Nobles, 17, had been shot outside a liquor store on nearby Mack Avenue; an informant had ID'd a man named Chauncey Owens as the shooter and provided this address.
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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honore de Balzac
"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it." ~Harry S. Truman
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