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Renisha McBride was shot while asking for help

Caperton

On Saturday, Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old black woman, was in a car accident in Dearborn Heights, a wealthy, majority-white city adjacent to Detroit. She was injured, she was disoriented, her cell phone was dead, and she knocked on the wrong door looking for help. She knocked on the door of a 54-year-old man, who opened the door and shot her in the face with a shotgun — either accidentally or justifiably, depending on whether you ask the man or his lawyer. While Michigan is a “stand your ground” state, there is no evidence that the man made any effort to contact police before he killed McBride, nor that she was armed with anything more than a dead cell phone.

Police requested an arrest warrant for the man on Tuesday, but the Wayne County prosecutor’s office asked the police to do further investigation before a warrant would be issued. McBride’s family asked the public that the police be given time to investigate, saying they’re confident that the man will ultimately be arrested. Renisha McBride was buried by her family and friends Friday morning.

72 thoughts on Renisha McBride was shot while asking for help

  2. I read that he thought she was breaking in. What utter fucking bullshit.

    Who knocks on the front door of a house they are trying to break into?

    2. He’ll say anything for sympathy, and the racists will eat it up and use it to defend him. Common sense has nothing to do with it.

    3. Who knocks on the front door of a house they are trying to break into?

      Home invaders for one, but they tend to dress up as cops, not injured girls.

  3. The way white people consistently shoot and kill black people in this country with utter impunity is horrifying.

    1. I know, right? The fact that some people continue to say that the US is in a post-racial state is infuriating.

  4. This whole case is just so disgusting and disturbing, and that the police apparently tried to sweep it under the rug and cover up what happened is also disturbing and yet utterly unsurprising. Anyone else also see how the police changed their story of what happened after the family and the press refused to take it at face value? First she was supposedly found on the street and then later the police fessed up that she was shot on the offender’s front porch.

    http://thehairpin.com/2013/11/renisha-mcbrid

  6. This is an outrageous situation. One’s life should depend on having a cell phone with you and charged at all times.

    I hope the family gets all of the support they need to both pursue the criminal charges but also, they need to sue this homeowner for everything he’s got – that will also make people think twice before aiming and shooting.

    But there really are no words for this tragedy, it’s just totally fucked up.

  7. This story is heartbreaking. And yet there are still assholes out there saying that racism is no longer a big deal because Oprah. (Yes, that’s an actual thing I’ve heard.)

    1. And yet there are still assholes out there saying that racism is no longer a big deal because Oprah. (Yes, that’s an actual thing I’ve heard.)

      Do those people also flip their shit over the “prejudice plus power” definition of racism because they think it’s part of some “reverse-racism” conspiracy?

      1. They absolutely do. It’s the Angry White Man phenomenon. A lot of this stuff is centered around a large contingent of conservative white Americans (including almost everyone aligned with the Tea Party) who are terrified that relatively soon they will be in the minority. These are the same people who moan about how things were so much better in the 50’s, but if you point out that is blatantly racist they piss and moan about throwing the “race card” and that they’re the victims of reverse racism. Fuck ’em.

        1. If minorities are treated as well as these racists claim, you’d think they wouldn’t fear minority status. The very fact they fear it tells you they know theyre full of shit.

        2. Totally agree. I think alot of whites in America believe that the mistreatment of minorities is the default setting for a society, but that doesnt have to be the case at all. That’s nothing but a justification.

        3. If minorities are treated as well as these racists claim, you’d think they wouldn’t fear minority status. The very fact they fear it tells you they know theyre full of shit.

          Exactly – well put. They only see things in terms of someone crushing someone else, so they’re terrified of not being the one doing the crushing. And the people they hurt don’t fucking matter to them.

        4. Pheeno, using your quote (with credit, if you want it. I don’t want to assume you want your moniker thrown around.).

          It’s perfect for a number of discussions I’ve sadly had to have lately.

      2. Yes. I’ve known white people who absolutely flip their shit if you so much as imply that they’ve never experienced racism because this one black person totally called them a cracker once. And the justice system can’t possibly be racist because a black man was the head of the justice department.

  9. Horrible, horrible story. And I don’t actually think it would be any less horrible if the person who murdered her turns out not to be white. (> 1/3 of Dearborn’s population identifies as being of Arab descent, for example.) Because he probably wasn’t black, and anti-black racism almost certainly played a large part in all this.

  10. I may be wrong to think this, but it seems to me that even thirty years ago when racism was more culturally prevalent, it would have been unthinkable to just blow away a person who has knocked on your door. Especially a man shooting a young woman. I think it is the fear mongering that has been going on in conservative America that is causing this witless butchery. It is still totally racist of course, just augmented by what seems like hysteria and gun proliferation as well.

    1. This reflects my ignorance of the area – but is Detroit very conservative? I would have guessed they’d be at the very least economically liberal given the prevalence of the auto industry and the associated unions.

    2. Something similar happened to a Japanese exchange in the early nineties. He and his friend were looking for a halloween costume party and went to the wrong house and got shot. I believe it was in Louisiana and I believe the shooter went to jail. I’ll bet the house and the farm that this guy doesn’t go to prison.

  11. This is so horrifyingly sad and awful; my heart goes out to her family.

    Almost 20 years ago, I was shot and wounded by an unknown assailant. I was just about the same age as Renisha. I was shot right in front of a townhouse community. I was badly hurt and confused and the only thought that was going through my head was “I need help.”

    I went to the closest house and started banging on the door. If that guy hadn’t answered, I would have gone to the next one, the next one, and the next one until someone answered. As it turned out, my story had a happy ending. The homeowner at the first house opened the door and called 911 and I spent the next week in the hospital. I guess it should go without saying that I’m also a petite white woman.

    WTF kind of country do we live in? Killing someone who’s armed only with a cell phone? Someone who’s just trying to get help? Who’s already scared and confused and hurt? Where white people apparently feel like they can shoot and kill non-threatening black teenagers with impunity? And the cops are helping them do it?

    All I can think of is poor Renisha on that doorstep, scared and hurt and thinking she was going to get help. What the fuck is going on in our country?

    2. WTF kind of country do we live in?

      A country that with a bloodsoaked history of genocide towards anyone not white.

      And the cops are helping them do it?

      If you ever want to get your blood boiling, check out the comments on PoliceOne.com. I’ll never forget this: PoliceOne has a Facebook page ( I was banned from there). A semi conservative white male left a comment there basically saying what a bunch of sick mfers they were after he’d read the PoliceOne.com main page.
      Their avatars are special too.
      Remember when Ice -T band Body Count released Cop Killer? (a good song too) People were more up in arms over that song, then actually police brutality. A song that is anti police brutality too.

  12. Pingback: Goblins, Deceivers, and Demons | Kate LeFranc

    1. I am glad that somebody finally figured out his name. I thought it was outrageous that they were withholding his name, as if he were the victim. Somehow black suspects don’t get their names withheld until they’re arrested.

      And, yes, he’s white. A little genelogical detective work shows these photos of his parents, Donald Lee and Colleen Wafer, published in his father’s obituary last year:

      http://obit.griffinfuneralhome.com/obitdisplay.html?task=Print&id=1040662

      Note the reference to his son Theodore, although I made the connection through other means.

      I would surmise that poor little innocent Theodore is one of the sons shown in the fourth photo from the left.

  15. I mean, just to contrast, remember when the women captured by that asshole Castro managed to escape because one of them appealed to the neighbor, a black man, to help, and he did? Rather than shooting her?

  16. This should enrage all good people in Detroit. I’m enraged. If this murderer doesn’t get prosecuted something very bad should happen to him. The Detroit town hall should get sacked. Fuck this shit. If there was still a Weathermen or a SDS worth a damn I’d join forces with them so fast. The system isnt failing people, it is an utter and complete failure. People in authority in Detroit should have to answer to the people face to face pissing their pants if justice isnt done. This country isnt noble and its very often not just. And way way too many people have an “Ive got mine” attitude about things.
    Forgive the rant, but these stories almost make me physically ill. So utterly enraging.

    1. The problem is, only radical Leftist politics address real inequities and injustices, albeit imperfectly. In some ways moderate Dems and their establishment are as culpable as the Tea Party. Fuck them too.

      1. I don’t agree at all. Culpable, yes, but I hate that sort of “equivalency” argument. And to say that radical leftist politics are flawed is a huge understatement. So if you’re going to go there, then fuck them too.

        1. I’m not saying they’re equivalent at all, no way. Just that they’re not helping anything which makes them culpable. They will talk alot, but this will happen again and again because the system is fundamentally broken.

        2. I should have just said the mainstream Dems are culpable and left it at that, i can see how that sounded like an equivalency and the comparison wasn’t necessary at all for my argument. I was just trying to illustrate how frustrated i get that the Democrats are all talk and no action when it comes to this. Black male incarceration rates havent gone down one iota. Neither has the poverty or unemployment. And things like this keep happening like clockwork. So hope and change my motherfucking ass.

        3. Mods if mother-effin is offensive please delete, i wasnt thinking. And if this needs to go to spillover thats fine, but I felt like discussing how the system is failing is pretty relevant to this tragedy.

      2. The problem is, only radical Leftist politics address real inequities and injustices, albeit imperfectly.

        Radical leftist politics have accomplished exactly shit.

        1. Don’t be absurd. Do you think the New Deal would ever have passed if the powers that be hadn’t been scared of the tide of radical leftism sweeping this country?

        3. Further, after the revolution in Cuba, infant mortality went way down and literacy went way up–due to deliberate interventions. “Not having achieved full communist utopia” is not the same as “not having achieved anything.”

        4. And then there’s labor organizing…

          Further, several revolutions across the world ain’t exactly nothing. Whether what has resulted from those revolutions is good is a different story–the Soviet Union was awful, but it’s not like Czarist Russia was so great, either–but radical leftist politics have, in fact, accomplished a great deal of change.

        5. Just a suggestion, but this thread started by ldouglas is beginning to look #spillover-worthy. Maybe you two (or three) should take it over there. I apologize if I’m butting in.

          1. Moderator note: seconding Ally’s suggestion to take this subthread to #spillover. It’s an interesting discussion, but it’s off-topic on this post.

        6. This is totally untrue. Radical leftism can change the “center of gravity” between progressive and conservative positions on a policy issue. Without the radical WSPU, women’s suffrage in Britain would not have become a mainstream cause; a few thousand active members galvanized the popular press to cover women’s suffrage in a serious way and paved the way for 500,000 women to join mainstream suffrage groups. Radical leftism and communist black thinkers helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the civil rights movement in the US. Radical leftists like Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Susan Brownmiller totally changed the tenor of the conversation in the women’s movement in the 1970s.

          And that’s not even including EG’s examples.

        7. The problem is, only radical Leftist politics address real inequities and injustices, albeit imperfectly.

          You are exactly wrong.

  18. Someone was telling me that you can’t actually shoot a burglar even if they are in your house with your valuables in hand. They have to actively to harming you or something.

    Anyway, something tells that that’s not what is going to happen in this case.

    1. Depends on the laws in that state. If there’s even a modicum of justice in Detroit this butcher will get convicted of manslaughter. But like you said, I doubt it.

  19. Dearborn Heights is not “wealthy…” maybe compared to Detroit, but what city isn’t? Please check your facts

      1. I think it matter because adding the “wealthy” was unnecessary sensationalism this story didn’t need. This story is horrific; it didn’t need to be “spiced up” with mis-information, and to do so is a disservice to the victim and the story.

  20. I think it’s terrible that the only person who answered the door that night did so with such fear. He had a gun before he knew who was on the other side of the door; and by what I’ve read, he wasn’t the first door she knocked on. The other people didn’t even answer.

    This one incident illustrates so many issues that I’m just going to break them down here.

    The fact that you can’t shoot a person on your front porch. You really, really shouldn’t be able to do that.

    The fact that the police fucked up royally; a corpse with a bullet hole warrants a full fucking investigation.

    None of that changes our poisonous, deadly relationship with guns in our country.

    The fact that a wounded woman walked around for a fucking hour and no one helped her.

    The fact that there is a serious, ongoing problem with race in our country.

    The fact that Detroit is talked about like it’s a war zone (didn’t we have a post about “poverty porn here?) panicking the citizens, and the fact that the city has been abandoned by both government and business.

    1. If you click through the link, it’s reported that a neighbor did come out to help her after the initial crash and called 911, but when she came back out, Renisha was gone. Although, I wonder if someone is just making that up cuz they feel bad. :/

      1. If you click through the link, it’s reported that a neighbor did come out to help her after the initial crash and called 911, but when she came back out, Renisha was gone. Although, I wonder if someone is just making that up cuz they feel bad. :/

        The 911 call would be taped so that’s easy enough to prove.

        If it turns out to be the truth. I imagine that person did something which, sadly, I might have done, which is to tell her they’d call 911 but they wouldn’t let her in the house, leaving her outside as they went to make the call, at which point she went to the next house. I’ve had a guy (white guy, so not totally analogous,) knocking on my door when I lived in Atlanta asking to use my phone and I was just too petrified to let him in because he sounded and looked to be acting unhinged (twitching and the like.) Now I wonder, could he have just been in a car accident?

        You do have to wonder how much the ‘reasonable’ fears (i.e. the fear of being victim of a crime, whether legit or down to media brainwashing) of the neighbors who may have been willing to help her drove her to the door of the man who shot her. I think you could actually change those attitudes, a lot easier than you could change the racist shooter.

        1. You do have to wonder how much the ‘reasonable’ fears (i.e. the fear of being victim of a crime, whether legit or down to media brainwashing) of the neighbors who may have been willing to help her drove her to the door of the man who shot her. I think you could actually change those attitudes, a lot easier than you could change the racist shooter.

          It was the middle of the night, so lots of people didn’t answer the door because they were probably sleeping. Theodore Paul Wafer, not his neighbors, is responsible for the actions of Theodore Paul Wafer.

  21. It would be hard to understand (based on what we know now) if this didn’t end up as a manslaughter charge: if he pulled the trigger intentionally then it’s an obvious crime, and even if you kill someone “accidentally” you should be liable for it if you start out by pointing a gun at their face. (The best way to avoid “accidentally” shooting someone is NOT TO POINT A GUN AT THEM .)

    That said he may well get off entirely, for similar reasons as in the Zimmerman trial: the shooter will presumably claim justification and the state will need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the killing wasn’t justified. I predict his testimony will be: (a) the victim was disoriented; (b) the victim wasn’t speaking or acting normally; (c) he therefore thought she was a threat; (d) so he was justified in shooting her. In other words, I bet he’s going to claim that he rationally misinterpreted her “post accident” state as an aggressive or unbalanced or drugged state, and he’ll claim that this misinterpretation was reasonable: “she wouldn’t tell me her name, and just kept mumbling something over and over again, and then she tried to push past me into the house, and I thought she was trying to grab the gun, so I shot her. I realize now that she was concussed, hurt, and scared–but at the time, I didn’t know.”

    Hopefully the fact that she knocked, and that he opened the door, will help prevent that defense. Hopefully the fact that she was a sympathetic victim will also help. But that’s a very difficult charge to make stick when the only witness is a dead victim. My depressing prediction is a manslaughter charge and a plea agreement with minimal, if any, jail time. I hope I’m wrong.

  22. I hope this doesn’t get me in trouble: Mother fking pigs. It’s not just a few bad apples: the whole system is toxic and the good ones are the exception.
    Trigger warning :unsolved death
    This kind of reminds me of how the cops treated Mitirice Richardson.
    This is one of the most unsettling, creepy case I’ve read.
    http://brotherpeacemaker.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/mitrice-richardson-is-just-another-missing-black-woman/
    The Mitrice Richardson Documentary {Dark Creek Productions}

  23. He has been charged with second degree murder and various lesser included offenses. Any “self-defense” claim will be hard to sustain, I think, given that he shot her in the face through a locked screen door. And it’s kind of hard to shoot someone in the face by accident with a shotgun unless it’s pointed at their face in the first place.

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