A 12-year-old holding and aiming a fake but real-looking gun out in public was shot dead by police last Saturday  in Cleveland, Ohio.  Was Tamir Rice just playing?  Maybe, but with kids getting suspended in school for making a Pop-Tart into a gun, and civil rights agitators telling blacks to watch out for profiling racist white cops, one might ask why young Rice didn't get the message.  Where were Mom and Dad?

Are the parents' personal histories relevant?  In cases like this, those in the mainstream media like to blame society, poverty, racism, Republicans, and, of course, the police.  So fair is fair.  If cops' addresses  can be published in the New York Times and their lives put under a microscope, then the egg and sperm donors of the young Tamirs who end up getting killed are fair game.  After all, Tamir wasn't carrying a book home from the library; he was carrying and aiming an Airsoft pistol with the orange tip removed.  Somebody thought it looked real enough to call 911, and the rest is just a tragedy all the way around.

Tamir's life from the beginning seemed to be pretty tragic.  Even before his mother had him, Samaria Rice was charged with aggravated robbery and assault in 2001. She pleaded guilty to the assault charge after a firearms specification was dropped.  Samaria received  a six-month suspended jail sentence.  In the same year, court documents show that Tamir's biological father, Leonard Warner, was convicted and sentenced to one-year probation for attacking Rice with a knife.

In 2010, Warner was again arrested in a domestic violence incident involving Tamir's mother.  Police reports for 2010 also show that Samaria called police twice on a live-in boyfriend, Michael Wiley, who she said had beaten her for two days.  Wiley was convicted and given a 90-day suspended jail sentence.

This past Tuesday, Warner, Tamir's father, requested a continuance on another domestic violence charge.  This time he is accused of punching his live-in girlfriend in the head and arms last August.

In 2012, court records show that Tamir's mother faced drug possession and trafficking charges in Cuyahoga County.  The same lawyer representing her now in the shooting of her son defended her against the charges in 2012.  In 2013, she received two years' probation after pleading guilty to the trafficking charge.

Who watched over Tamir while all this was going on?  Grandma, Uncle Sam, or both?  If the cop used poor judgment, what about the parents?  Maybe if the corrupt, money grubbing race-baiters spreading lies about white privilege and racist cops would shut up, the so-called mothers and fathers in the black community abandoning their kids to the streets  would actually care about them before they end up dead.

Read more Evans at exzoom.net.