Two Boys Killed

A Grievous Loss

Yesterday, we were celebrating our middle school son’s birthday, and I learned that two boys barely older than him were murdered.

Amarr Murphy was killed midday in front of Garfield High School, while courageously stepping up and trying to break up a fight between two other boys. His pastor and coach posted on Facebook that he was a leader on and off the field, and I sure as hell believe that, from a kid who put himself in the middle of a fight. 

In Renton, another teenage boy was murdered by a 51-year old man, who fancied himself a kind of mall-cop, and had decided this boy was planning on robbing a store. The King County Sheriff’s office was holding an exercise in the same parking lot at the same time. 

Both boys received immediate medical attention. 

Both boys, and their futures–their wins, their losses, their careers, their loves and heartbreaks, their dumb jokes and big thoughts, their ecstasies and drudgeries, their travels and travails and meals with family and friends and joy while maybe raising future children, their grandchildren and great grandchildren and all the richness their possible offspring might have brought to the world for countless generations–were cruelly ripped away. 

I wanted to acknowledge these horrific events while also admitting that I don’t have the right words to express the rage and grief this deserves. I’m heartbroken for these boys and their families. It was so courageous of Amarr to step in and try to stop a fight. It was so innocent for this other boy to go with his friends to the store to make a return, like any kid should be able to do without worry.

That courage and that innocence were repaid with death. In one case, death was probably brought by another child–which is itself another kind of devastation. In the other, by a paranoid old fool. In both cases, two beautiful boys’ lives were destroyed, and dozens others were ruined. 

And in both cases, we as a collective community have chosen to live in ways that made this much more likely to happen. 

Yes, of course they are in my thoughts and prayers and whatever way I can show and feel solidarity–particularly with those mommas and daddies whose hearts hurt in a way that only a parent can even begin to fathom. I am a religious person and when my heart hurts this bad I don’t know where else to turn. 

But let’s be clear, my thoughts and prayers, however earnest, aren’t going to do a damn thing for these families. Because their babies are gone.