No. 611 - OUR NATION'S RISING CRIME PROBLEM

No 611

Jim Davidson — NEWSPAPER COLUMN

OUR NATION’S RISING CRIME PROBLEM

It has been said that into every life a little rain must fall. Not will fall, but must fall. There is nothing I enjoy more than a good clean laugh and sharing stories, ideas and concepts with you that are informative, motivating and inspirational. We all need a liberal dose of that. At least, I know I do. There are times, however, when we need to hear the plain, unadulterated and often painful truth, and any columnist worth his or her salt who is not willing to also share that with you is doing you a disservice.
The bottom line here is that our nation is experiencing a rising crime problem, and every law-abiding citizen in our country needs to work to combat and do something about it. If we don’t do something about it, we are going to leave our children and grandchildren a bigger mess than we have now. We know that the murder rate in the United States increased more than 10 percent this past year and it’s not just murder that we have to curb, but also lesser crimes like armed robbery, theft and vandalism that costs us billions of dollars each year.
Here in our community we are seeing rising crime as well. Our local paper carried a headline recently that read, “Business break-ins mount over weekend” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The thing that has motivated me to share this with you is a true story a friend sent me about a crime that was committed in Memphis, Tenn., recently. This story was carried by the Memphis Commercial Appeal. What is unusual about this story is that it was committed by a woman, which is not too unusual, but this woman was carrying a baby, who was used to disarm the victim.
Here is a portion of what this article said, “One of my oldest dearest girl friends Heather in Memphis was carjacked and shot Monday night. She is in stable condition and doing fine after surgery Monday night, lucky to be alive. Please let this be a lesson to be wary of random crime. She offered a young woman and her baby, in a car seat, a ride outside a Walgreens near her house. This woman wanted to go up the street to the library. After getting in the back seat with her baby, she told her to drive to an ATM, now with a gun in her side.
"Heather drove several blocks and had the feeling that she was going to shoot her anyway, so at a busy intersection, she threw it in park and jumped out the door to run. The woman shot her in the back, which went through and exploded through her chest. Heather ran into the street bleeding as the young woman jumped in the front seat and sped away, hitting other cars in the intersection trying to get away. A passerby got to Heather and held pressure on spewing blood; she lost half of her blood on the street waiting on the ambulance as she heard her car speeding away.
The 20-year-old attacker was pursued by other alert motorists who were calling 911. The now-panicked woman sped a few blocks and wrecked the car into a house, upside down, left the baby, the gun and Heather’s purse, and ran. The police showed up and arrested her. It turns out the attacker had done the same thing the day before, holding a gun to the head of an old lady and stole her purse before jumping out and running. She had been spotted hanging around the Walgreens hours before Heather was there."
There are at least two important lessons here — The sad story of a young woman whose life has gone terribly wrong and the Good Samaritan who had stopped to help Heather when she needed help, otherwise she would have bled to death. The saddest thing for me is that someone reared this young woman and failed to teach her anything about character, compassion and earning an honest living. I just wonder what kind of person her baby will turn out to be.
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(EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Davidson is a motivational speaker and syndicated columnist. You may contact him at 2 Bentley Drive, Conway, Ark. 72034. To support literacy, buy his book, “Learning, Earning & Giving Back.”)