KING: By Releasing His Killer, Louisiana Just Said That Joe McKnight’s Black Life Didn’t Matter

Anybody who lives in Louisiana knows about Joe McKnight. There, he was a liv­ing leg­end. A king.

Yeah, he played pro foot­ball for the Chiefs and Jets. Yeah, he played col­lege ball for the University of Southern California Trojans, but in Louisiana, he was a god. One of the best high school ath­letes in the his­to­ry of the state, the Times-Picayune named him the Best Male Athlete of the Decade. He was that good and did it all right in the mid­dle of Hurricane Katrina. His home was destroyed when he was a junior in high school, he was sep­a­rat­ed from his moth­er dur­ing the evac­u­a­tion and end­ed up being forced to bounce around the state. In spite of it all, he helped his team win the state cham­pi­onship, was the Parade National Player of the Year, and the con­sen­sus num­ber one run­ning back recruit in the country.

Joe McKnight’s killer walks free, but he’s not in the clear yet

At a time when Louisiana need­ed a good sto­ry, Joe McKnight, just a teenag­er, with gifts galore, pro­vid­ed one — and the state nev­er for­got it.

That he was repeat­ed­ly shot and killed in broad day­light in the mid­dle of a Louisiana road­way Thursday has left many of my friends who per­son­al­ly knew Joe crushed, con­fused, bit­ter and angry.

People saw it hap­pen. A wit­ness said that a white man, 54-year-old Ronald Gasser, was the aggres­sor. Images of Gasser on the scene seem to show that he didn’t have a sin­gle scratch on him. It does not appear to have been self-defense. This wit­ness even said that after Gasser first shot him, that he stood over McKnight and shot him some more. Police have said that McKnight was unarmed.

It’s hard for me to not believe that race was a fac­tor in this killing — par­tic­u­lar­ly in light of the fact that we’ve seen near­ly 1,000 hate­ful inci­dents since Donald Trump was elect­ed. All over the coun­try, peo­ple of col­or are being attacked — many for the first time in their lives. Will Sims, a beloved California musi­cian, was mur­dered by white men in a hate crime in California just days after Trump was elect­ed. James Means, a sweet 15-year-old boy, was mur­dered the fol­low­ing week by a 62-year-old white man who claimed Means bumped into him at the dol­lar store. Read more here :  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-louisiana-joe-mcknight-black-life-doesn-matter-article‑1.2896251