“Freeze it there.”
I didn’t really want to see it, but I wanted to freeze the recording there, an instant after the bullet struck Jaklyn Sanders in the bridge of her nose – just to confirm that it was a precision, carefully targeted shot.
The image was macabre. It was still clear that she was a beautiful woman – the bright and intelligent eyes, the high cheekbones, the carefully quaffed mane of hair – but those features were all out of place, like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces broken apart but still close to each other. I couldn’t help but stare at her eyes, which still had a spark of light that was fading fast, one eye unnaturally an inch or two above the other and separated by a large, round, red hole with black around the edges.
One instant she was describing the sudden attack by government forces on unarmed protesters, and the next instant she was gone, simply gone.
“A shot like that, that’s a well-aimed shot,” I said. “Somebody took her out deliberately. This wasn’t random.” I sensed agreement around the room, but no one else spoke. They were all staring at the image, too, trying to make sense of the sight, their brains trying to re-assemble the face into its proper alignment.
The official story was that the officers had fired to defend themselves against an angry mob, that they just fired indiscriminately to drive off the rioters. I was charged with inciting the riot, never mind that it wasn’t an actual riot until the shots were fired.
But here was grisly but hard-to-dispute evidence that at least one shot wasn’t indiscriminate, and that particular shot happened to kill the reporter who was closest to the center of action, the reporter who could affirm to the world that the chaos and destruction was caused by the security force, not by the people who wanted nothing more than to go to work and to support the people who were reporting to their office.
My defense would depend on convincing a jury that my intentions were peaceful and nonviolent. At least, that was the strategy.
No comments:
Post a Comment