Another Black Man Murdered in Coastal Georgia
Running & Stunning & Gunning & Shunning Without Cunning Any Sense of Responsibility for the Carnage Wreaked in Our Names
CRIMINAL INJUSTIC IS A SYSTEM---EITHER WE CHANGE IT, OR IT WILL CONTINUE TO EXPLODE IN OUR CHILDREN’S FACES
Working as a prison guard has to be some of the most grueling and gruesome work imagineable. This would prove especially true---at least I want desperately to think so---when the normal course of a shift involves killing someone with a stun gun. This has occurred twice in the past five months at the Houston County Jail in Perry, Georgiai, the most recent case sending 28 year old Melvin Samuel to an early grave. His CRIME was failure to appear for a traffic offense.
Taser International, Inc., the manufacturer of the device, acknowledges that over the years their equipment has ‘correlated with death,’ as opposed to causing mortality, roughly forty times. An interesting fact is that two of these cases, five per cent of the total admitted deaths, have occurred at Houston County’s small facility, in a rural/small town jurisdiction that accounts for roughly one millionth of the Taser’s sales and distribution. That HUGE, mega-quantum leap, from less than one-ten-thousandth of a per cent of use to five per cent of the deaths, is also, to say the least, fascinating.
There are hundreds of stories like this each day around the South, an apparently random viciousness on a case by case basis, that when analyzed comprise a pretty obvious pattern of White supremacist politics and systematic oppression of Black and poor people in a way that further enriches the already bloated with wealth and seems to aim at the utter disempowerment of the already downtrodden.
As is the case in so much of what I post, I can barely scratch the surface of this story. Resources are available to report on the bowel movements of George W. Bush, but finding support for covering crimes against humanity committed by Americans against Americans is only on the level of a pittance outside the South, and in Dixie such efforts are on an “all volunteer” basis most of the time.
With a few thousand dollars, a clever researcher could find out and report more or less precisely what happened at the jail. With even less than that, the legal posture of the various parties now would be easy to determine. With a substantial multiple of the initial amount, the network of Southern writers and investigators I’ve been trying to build lo these many years could actually become a functional entity. This would allow for comparative analysis, data collection and assessment, searchable databases on individuals and cases, all of which would make defending ourselves against murderous authorities easier.
None of these things are possible now, however, and a storm of unprecedented intensity, to rival that great conflict of 150 years ago, is brewing again if this capacity to obtain power peacefully does not come to pass. What can we say today, about this case of police authorities murdering another Black man, as if God, as well as the law granted immunity to adorn their arrogant impunity?
Melvin Samuel was a powerful bull of a man, dreadlocks and muscle making him fearsome in his mien. He was intelligent, a hairsbreadth away from being a highly paid technical draftsman and industrial engineer. He had a history of depression and anxiety(GO FUCKING FIGURE!! BEING A BLACK MAN IN SOUTH GEORGIA; WHAT’S TO DEPRESS A BODY OR MAKE HIM ANXIOUS?). On Sunday, he called the police about suspecting an intruder at his house.
When they arrived, they saw fit to see if they had any reason to act against him. They discovered the ‘FTA’ from Houston County, and over the on-her-knees pleas of Melvyn’s mother, Chatham County’s finest dragged him in cuffs to the squad car and subsequently a hundred and fifty miles, from Savannah to the South of Macon. When his jailers tried to transfer him from his holding cell to the jail, instead of releasing him on bail, he went ballistic, they shocked him repeatedly and dragged him unconscious to his appointed domicillary quarters, where they left him to die---they didn’t even bother to check on him for a quarter hour, in wilfully malicious misconduct clearly prohibited by their own procedural manuals, which require immediate attention to determine the vital signs of individuals jolted with 60,000 volts and left spasmodic and immobilized.
These are the essential narrative facts. Additional noisome authoritarian behavior occurred when Houston County authorities insisted that Melvin’s mother must pay the entire $750 find before she could “see” her son. When she had borrowed every cent she could and paid the amount in full, they informed her of Melvin’s demise and gave her directions to the morgue. There are other minor instances of brazen misconduct, institutionalized sadism, and generally proud stupidity, which will appear in later postings on this case as it develops from here.
There are dozens of other interesting aspects to the case, as well, contextual details that suggest sinister doings in Savannah. Mr. Samuel was an outspoken advocate for reforming the police and for providing citizen oversight of police brutality cases, which are as common as corn in and around coastal Georgia, for example. Family members are longstanding civil rights advocates and supporters of Black empowerment causes, as well. He despised the medication that authorities had dispensed to him when he was in an mental institution. These and other facts are important to put together in a fully realized story of this willfully imposed American tragedy, an institutionalization of the tragic that is about to blow up in our faces.
And dozens of important questions are obvious to ask but impossible to answer with the media almost universally under the control of the cronies, siblings, and close cousins of the businesses and politicians who run and otherwise grow fat on the Prison-Industrial-Complex. How many White FTA cases result in no-bail incarceration(not to mention Taser utilization)? What were the drugs that mental health authorities had prescribed for Mr. Samuel? What was the nature of his experience when he spent part of one year at the Georgia Regional Mental Health Facility? These and other critical inquiries await the commitment and will to build a people’s media in the South.
In a few years, perhaps sooner, if the entire region does not explode in revolt before then, the Samuels will recover some low-six-figure sum for the death of their son. This insult will have to suffice for justice, until the folks to whom this is happening, and the folks who continue to pretend it’s not happening, find a way to stand together to change the systematic brutalization that occurs as a matter of course against poor people and, especially, people of color. That White people, who are not practicing Nazis, do not see that this situation is a body blow to any hope of a human future for our children, this lack of consciousness is what amazes me. I pray every day for the capacity more fully to mediate these important stories.
Until that larger capacity is available, these sketches and diatribes will have to do. The conclusion seems obvious that folks better start to PAY ATTENTION!! What is happening is no longer a precursor to a fascist police state. It is a fascist police state. We may very well arise one morning to unholy slaughter as the best we can hope to obtain for our progeny. If that comes to pass, with Camus, I will end with: “All I can say, my fellow citizens, is that we deserved it.”