He was a victim! The man who cold-bloodedly shot Officers Ramos and Liu gets a shocking amount of sympathy and understanding from the New York Times today.  The three (!) writers assigned to the story, Kim Barker, Mosi Secret and Richard Fausset present us such empathy as:

In reality, Mr. Brinsley’s short life was a series of disappointments.

He was the difficult teenager who was passed around from home to home, the adult who could make nothing work, not a T-shirt company, not even an attempt on his own life at a former girlfriend’s house.

Everyone seemed to betray him. The friends who pistol-whipped and robbed him in May. The girlfriend who dumped him around Thanksgiving.

In recent weeks, Mr. Brinsley was unraveling, increasingly desperate, the gap between the life he wanted at age 28 and the life he had looming ever larger. If he couldn’t get it together, he told the mother of his second child in early December, he would kill himself.

Not only was Brinsley a man worthy of pity, you can’t blame the left and the climate of anti-police hatred:

But the truth of Mr. Brinsley’s short life and violent end is probably less political and more accidental than initially portrayed, friends and his mother said. He was no ardent anti-police activist, as some of his friends were. He was nursing no grudge against the police in Brooklyn. He was no stone-cold criminal; his 20 arrests were mostly for minor crimes, even though they prevented him again and again from getting a job.

He struggled with depression but had no history of hallucinations or other forms of psychosis, unlike his oldest brother, who battled schizophrenia. His version of Islam seemed more jumbled than jihadi. Instead, Mr. Brinsley seemed to be a grandstander at the end of his tether, homeless, jobless and hopeless.

Poor baby!

No reference to the lives and sorrows of the two police officers killed or their families.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky