When An Immigrant Is Murdered – Botham Shem Jean And Donald Trump’s Double Standard

By Felicia J. Persaud

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Sept. 14, 2018: By now many have heard the sad case of another black man shot by a U.S. police officer, this time an upstanding legal Caribbean immigrant with a stellar future ahead of him and from an upstanding family.

According to Dallas police reports, St. Lucia-born, Botham Shem Jean, 26, was in his home in the South Side Flats of Dallas, Texas, when he was shot dead by a Dallas police officer around 10 p.m. on Thursday September 6, 2018.

This was unlike so many police brutality stories you hear and unlike most of the fake news claims by the US’ commander-in-chief of immigrants who come to the U.S. to rape and murder and commit violent crimes against native-born Americans.

In this instance, Botham Shem Jean was in his own apartment after a day’s work at accounting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers when he was shot dead by a cop. By all indication, Jean is exactly the kind of immigrant Trump loves to claim he supports – an immigrant who would easily fit under the label ‘merit-based;’ an immigrant who completed a college education in America and was now working hard, paying taxes and being an upstanding citizen in his adopted homeland.

Jean attended church, sang in the choir, gave back and has no rap sheet that can be dragged up to defame him and his family.

Yet, this young immigrant was senselessly and bizarrely shot to death in cold blood by a 30-year-old White, female Dallas Police Officer who has stuck to the story that she thought she was entering her own apartment and thought Jean was an intruder.

No report to date has addressed whether the officer, now identified as Amber Guyger, yelled at Jean to halt, put his hands up, had a dialogue or any other conversation before she killed him.

What is most bizarre, is exactly how Guyger entered Jean’s apartment while thinking it was her own? She claims the door was ajar and she saw a dark silhouette which made her believe it was a burglar.

However, the Jean family attorney now claims an eyewitness heard a female voice saying: “let me in” while knocking on the door and some one opening the door and then gunshots as a male voice questioned: “Oh My God, why did you do that?”

This begs the question – Did they know each other and were they having a personal relationship that went bad? Was it a crime of passion? There are more questions than answers, just like Jean’s mother said.

The fact, however, is that you cannot mistakenly enter someone else’s apartment thinking it’s your own, since your key would not work, and you would soon realize it’s not your apartment.

What is disturbing, is that the officer was not arrested and charged with a crime until almost three days later.  And when she was, she was charged with manslaughter and released on bail.

Manslaughter not murder!

Further, the arrest only came after the Jean family met with the Dallas DA and demanded she be arrested.

Contrast this entire situation to if Jean had been the one to enter Guyger’s apartment by mistake, and then shoot and kill her. Do you really believe that he would have been arrested three days later and then only slapped with manslaughter charge and given bail?

Further, do you think the U.S. President would have stayed silent as he has done with this case?

Absolutely not! He would have set Twitter alight immediately as he has done so many times when immigrants have been accused of crime.

And that is exactly where justice is not blind, and the hypocrisy of the right continues to tear this country apart. There is always a different kind of justice for blacks, Latinos and immigrants, who are presumed guilty until proven innocent.

If Jean had been the one who shot and killed Guyger, Donald Trump and his right-wing cult would have used that as the campaign theme into November, much like they have done with the Molly Tibbets case and her alleged killer, Mexican immigrant Cristhian Bahena Rivera.

Just like they have done with so many other cases where immigrants have been the alleged killers, while all the while using fake data to support the xenophobic claim that immigrants are committing the most crimes against Americans and it is why we need to round them up deport them, keep them out and build the wall.

They cannot use this narrative with the Jean case and so, like the hypocrites they are, they choose to now stay silent, perpetrating the double-standard and widening the racial divide, all while an innocent immigrant black man has had his life cut short and a Caribbean immigrant family must now bury their son and find a way to come to grips with his horrific murder. But who cares?

It does not fit into the Trump narrative and its just another black man!

The writer is CMO at Hard Beat Communications, Inc. which owns the brands: NewsAmericasNow, CaribPRWire and InvestCaribbeanNow.