This NPR story was one of the hardest-hitting accounts I've had to read about the gun massacre in Uvalde and it's aftermath, and resulting coverup and in truth it says very little. It's just a mention, really of the part-time coroner for the county who was tasked with writing the death certificates and helping to identify the dead at Robb Elementary, a school the coroner went to himself as a 4th grader. One of his former fellow alumni was the brave, slain teacher Irma Garcia who was only one grade younger than he.
Many of you here know how small a town Uvalde is. Imagine how small it seems to the coroner. A man who literally had to say, "these 19 children, these two educators, they don't live here anymore," and then complete the paperwork while standing over their corporal beings, their bodies, or what remained of them after they were visited by senseless, preventable gun violence.
I put in the title of the post a hint at a classic piece of writing called "A Modest Proposal" from 1729, by Jonathan Swift, which you can google if you like. Those who know it can draw conclusions already but it's a devastatingly hard piece of basically not-funny satire about children at risk, so I feel it has a place here if you are the sort than can handle dark satire with your grief, pain and anger. If not, skip it, it's not important. But one lesson we learned as a society from it is to always separate the message from the messenger when possible, and to see the theoretical gesture as sometimes as important as the real effect it may have just for us all to contemplate it fully.
Ideas matter. Thought and intent are basic but vital. Our hearts and minds must work in concert if we are to survive and prosper in any meaningful way. In other words, important stuff with BIG WORDS and bigger ideals are going to be discussed here. Please join in or it won't mean anything at all.
What is important to me is to put forth an idea I don't really feel entitled to thrust upon others but mainly would like to mention as a thing to keep in mind for the community at large to voice an opinion on.
And that idea is the need for a Coroner’s Inquest in the matter of the killings on May 24th at Robb Elementary on Uvalde, Texas. A procedure to establish the means and manner by which death visited 21 souls.
I'll explain as best I can the full idea below the page break, but bear with me while I give some background and examples of how this may be a good idea to consider.
And once again I want to turn attention back to the past, where concepts of civil society and the rights of a free people can be found, arguments that seem to be brought up strongly in Uvalde, including the arguments for and against individual gun ownership, police accountability, for and against police existing at all, the need and cost of government transparency, the rights of citizens to be safe against violence and the purpose of the State itself and what it owes the people, and what the people owe to it. This is coming from the time of the Magna Carta, originally written over 800 years ago. In the 1920s Lord Denning described it as "the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot."
So these are not new ideas and new arguments. And, in fact, this radical idea I am bringing up has a recent appearance worth noting.
I'll try to get to the more concrete stuff now that I've bored us all to tears. But I am being as brief as I know how and still explain all the reasons for what I am getting at, my own "modest proposal."
In September of 2020, a young man in Los Angeles was killed by a Sheriff's deputy after a clouded altercation. His name was Andres Guardado and he was 18, of Salvadoran heritage. He lived in Koreatown and worked, and hung out at an automobile shop in Gardena. I'm not going to mince words because this is my post. He was murdered by cowards, who were cops, and his murder was covered up because they were cops in a Gang of cops. To cover their crime, they planted a gun near his body and destroyed evidence. It was awful, and they got away with I because their boss the Sheriff was en more corrupt than they.
But here is a somewhat more dry and factual synopsis, with links if you are ready for a deep dive or you can just get the important parts by reading on here.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/18/1996599/-Andres-Guardado-murdered-5x-in-the-back-by-LA-Deputies-continues-to-fight-injustice-from-his-grave
What matters is this: His family and his community fought for justice and found SOME, and that's why I want to introduce you all to his story and link it hopefully, to where the people who were most harmed in Uvalde might look to for some inspiration.
Andres Guardado, 18 years old, was most definitely murdered by LA Sheriff’s deputy Miguel Vega after being chased by Sheriff’s Deputies Miguel Vega and Chris Hernandez in Gardena, California, an unincorporated part of the greater Los Angeles city/county metroplex. His body contained no drugs of alcohol, he committed no crime, had a clean record, was working one of two jobs and enrolled in technical school at the time of his killing. His family swears he never owned or carried a gun. He told relatives he himself had considered a career as a cop. He had no gang affiliation, no colored clothing or tattoos to indicate gang related activity, nor was the auto shop he associated with considered gang-affiliated. What they did was sell nitrus oxide to street racers, a grey area that is not illegal but had drawn the prior attention of law enforcement. Andres was seemingly acting as a lookout and went to warn his friends when he was briefly chased and then shot five times in the back by deputies who themselves have allegations of gang activity, suspicious pasts of lying to investigators and fabricating evidence, and whose separate stories fail to fully corroborate one another. Cameras and eye witnesses were present, and deputies in a panic immediately smashed six to eight wall mounted cameras in a likely attempt to buy time to find and plant a throwdown gun. Yet the usual police department procedure, cop union rules, media-managed spin and PR and slow-waking of information kept the suspicious killing off the top shelf of public attention for months.
(also from the same Kos Diary)
In the immediate wake of the George Floyd protests, which caused widespread property destruction in Los Angeles, a teen was shot by county deputies last June under suspicious circumstances and the facts were suppressed harshly by an embattled Sheriff, Alex Villanueva who was already on public notice for his seeming personal corruption. A campaign of what amounts to the usual amount of post-shooting spin failed to quiet the pubic but the scandal also failed to galvanize national attention like the killing of Floyd because even though it too may have been captured on video, deputies acted quickly to destroy area security cameras and confiscate the DVR that may have recorded the chase and shooting. (So quickly as reportedly to not first obtain a warrant for the panicked camera-smashing and tape-deck grabbing.). Everything else that occurred should be viewed in the light of this all-important action- the killing might have been on video and deputies acted suspiciously because of it, and LASD acted as a department to obscure that suspicious act.
Everything else flows from this, even though the “juicy” detail is that the teen was shot five times in the back in a manner that proves murder. That comes later, and as we shall see, much later. Slow-walking the truth is vital to Villanueva’s attempt to both keep the peace in LA country and hold onto his power as Sheriff. He who controls the timeline controls the truth.
It's a long story and you can read all about it elsewhere but the important part here is that a relatively minor official in the usual scope of things decided to make big headlines and sought justice where there was none, and that person was the Los Angeles Country Coroner. He convened an inquest, and sent subpoenas out to the relevant officials. Such an inquest had not been held in over 30 years in Los Angeles. It was major news and caused a lot of people to look at the case with fresh eyes, eyes that were not blundered by the official story from police who investigate themselves.
In the end, sadly the inquest found no justice for the murdered teen, but it did serve as a beacon of truth in a sea of lies. One of the cops fled to Mexico, and his partner sent an excuse letter instead of answering the subpoena. Homicide investigators pled the Fifth Amendment rather than answer basic questions, which was just bizarre. One wondered what laws they didnt want to incriminate themselves in, but we didnt get those answers, either. It was just a gigantic Eff-You to the idea of actual justice coming from the ranks and the people instead of from the Lawmen and their arrogance. It broke down as a a big turf battle between cops who demand to investigate themselves and good people in good government offices who dared to do their jobs right for the right reasons, whether anyone got exposed as corrupt or not.
It was powerful, and it was beautiful to witness. It was a symbolic victory just like one might claim defeat at the Alamo was a symbolic victory for the independence of Texas from Mexico or some such claim that resonates, although I wish I had a better example on the tip of my fingers to relate. But it was that kind of BIG, to the grieving family and a lot of strong supporters who were painfully marginalized. There is vindication even in defeat, if you never surrender, and if the world sees the cowardice of your opponent in his undeserved "victory."
And maybe, most importantly it got some citizens thinking about BIG issues that again, date all the way back to the days of the Magna Carta and the need to examine not only the problems we face today with the eyes, logic and habits of today but instead with the force of history, basic human philosophy and the ability to see that sometimes events conspire to cause us to re-think the entire system. "When in the course of human events" times. SYSTEMIC FAILURE times. Fascist coup attempt times, to bring in another possibly not-so-unrelated idea of "who runs things here," the people or the ones who think they are the heroes and maybe aren't. And the need for a belief in our institutions even when sometimes they fail us mightily, for in the end these institutions are us, and we are them.
Historically, and in many ways still today the High Sheriff and the Coroner are two offices of the Crown (or our democratic republic act as a check and balance upon one another in some ways. Usually they don't have too much to do with one another, really tho, the Sheriff and the coroner, usually an elected position in the USA and less important now then the state medical examiners, who are civil servants and as such more of a function of the state at large. But the mechnaics of all this is where we get the idea of Habeus Corpus, or "produce the body" from, a cornerstone of our version of The Law, our justice system as it exists today.
If the sheriff says a murder took place, and the accused feels his is being wronged, he can petition the coroner to "produce the body." "No dead body, no murder" is the basic idea.
But I'm vastly oversimplifying, and I am not a lawyer. No doubt, I may have some of this completely wrong. Yet the bedrock principle is what matters. and it goes like this: Cops don't have all the power, or the final say. We, the people do. The coroner's inquest is an extension of that basic idea, that cops are not the only ones who get to say what justice is, what the truth is, what really happened and how and why and what it means.
So, the coroner can say, this person didn’t fall off a ladder, they were shot, and then the Sheriff is sent to investigate. But the coroner can do a version of his (or her) own investigation, too. That's where the inquest comes in.
An inquest is an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding a death. The purpose of the inquest is to find out who the deceased person was and how, when and where they died and to provide the details needed for their death to be registered. It is not a trial. (wiki)
I'm not saying Uvalde should do this, but it's a radical possibility that might be an idea worth exploring in that it may bring some much needed transparency to the town. The general idea would be to call for an inquest, a single one or a group thing, maybe a series of them and then request the testimony of various parties who were involved. Fill in the blanks yourself on who would be asked to provide what testimony and what evidence. I'll give my opinions in the comments section if there is a discussion to be had here.
But I'm serious about the proposal and wondering if anyone else has thought of it or what we all think the Coroner might say about the idea, or how one would even care to approach him respectfully to ask. Again, I am not the one to do the asking. I'm just making a proposal to have a discussion on the topic. Very basic and preliminary thoughts about an unusual idea.
I think, for example that 376 cases of LEOs saying "I plead the fifth" would be quite interesting and might eventually help get some meaningful policy drawn up and enacted somehow. It's a conversation starter at the least.