It must have been a big car.
The one that passed the one Shakema Buckmon was driving Sunday night.
It was coming at her, across the street from Brighton Academy, around the corner from Bellevue Elementary, on Grant Avenue in Syracuse, New York.
It was Shakema and her cousin in the front seat, and their baby girls in the backseat, running to the store to get some groceries. Dior Harris, her cousin’s girl, was 11 months old, and Shakema’s girls were 3 and 8. Happily in the backseat of the family car, buckled in and safe.
Well, not safe.
Nobody’s truly safe in urban America anymore.
And nobody was safe in that car that night.
Not on Grant Avenue in Syracuse, New York.
Because as the cars came abreast – Shakema’s car, and a piece-of-crap 2003 Honda Accord – shots rang out.
At least five of them.
They base that on the wounds.
The 8-year-old got hit once, and the 3-year-old got hit once, and the little baby took three rounds.
She would have turned 1 on the 29thof this month.
But like I was saying, it must have been a big car.
The 2003 Honda Accord.
It turned out to be registered to Chavez Ocasio, a 23-year-old who is one of those guys Hillary used to call “super-predators.” He’s charged with murder now. Sunday night he was a parolee who had spent four years in state prison for burglary.
He’s got quite a clip file.
In September of 2014, they were writing about how he had supposedly shot a 13-year-old in the head.
That was with a shotgun.
Chavez Ocasio, who was 17 then, and on probation, got in a beef with the 13-year-old in front of a bodega on Pond Street. Then, the next day, the story goes, Chavez Ocasio got a shotgun and slipped through a series of backyards and came up behind the 13-year-old and let him have it in the back of the head.
They got him through witnesses and video.
But they couldn’t keep him because the victim, who somehow survived his traumatic brain injury, refused to participate in the prosecution.
Another time they wrote about Chavez Ocasio was just last fall, at Onondaga Community College, in the “Student Spotlight.”
It was one of those stroke jobs about “getting a second chance at life.”
“Just because you have a bad moment,” the head-shooting ex-con told a particularly gullible scribe, “that’s not who you are. People can change. Real people elevate. It makes you stronger when you get caught up in a bad situation and get out.”
Then the gag-me story of getting his GED behind bars and deciding that he wanted to study business and that he was going to graduate so that his mommy could watch him walk across a stage.
Pure bull crap. The kind that works on parole boards and people who write for community-college newsletters.
At any rate, he was paroled from prison on the burglary charge in January of 2020, started at the JUCO shortly thereafter, and had some chick knocked up by the end of his second semester, in spite of the social distancing.
And somewhere along the line he got that 2003 Honda Accord, the one the shots that killed the baby came from.
And like I was saying, it must have been a big car.
Because a lot of people had to fit in it, all the various accomplices and enablers. Shooting a baby isn’t a one-man job.
It takes a whole, corrupt, failed community to put three rounds into a kid who’s never even tasted birthday cake.
Start with the family and the neighborhood and the homies, every person who shaped or tolerated this piece of Phi Theta Krappa garbage. Add in the useless parole system and the activists and the bureaucrats who castrate and hobble it. Don’t forget the woke professors and social engineers who are certain that miscreants are victims, driven to desperation by an oppressive society and systemic something or the other.
But foremost, while you’re packing accomplices into the Accord, make sure you get the Democrat politicians whose pro-criminal, anti-victim agenda enables and empowers the violent ravaging of society and its most vulnerable members.
When you don’t punish criminal conduct, you get more of it. When you don’t fight violence, you invite it. When the worst crimes are consistently committed by parolees, that’s not a coincidence. When you care more about the rights of criminals than you do the rights of victims, you’re going to get more of both. When Democrats decriminalize crime, through revolving door incarceration and the elimination of bail, you get more crime and more dead victims.
This poor little girl, this sad proof of that assertion, is only noteworthy because of her age.
Dior Harris is a name that won’t be remembered. There will be no marches or hashtags, no national outcry, no demands for justice or social introspection for root causes.
And no accepting of responsibility by those whose failings and philosophies had a hand in her death.
It was a big car, a very big car. Loaded full of progressive lies.
And it was headed straight to hell.