Where Is the Justice for Aiyana Stanley Jones?

by Brittany Shoot · 2010-05-17 09:00:00 UTC
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Anyone reading this blog likely knows a bit about the nauseating, disproportionate violence against women and children in this world. If you have empathic traits and tendencies like I do, it never really gets easier to process and absorb the ways innocent people are abused and destroyed. For me, the question is what you do, how you cope, in the face of unjustifiable violence, when the victim is a seven-year-old girl.

This weekend, Detroit police shot and killed a little girl named Aiyana Stanley Jones. At the little girl's home to execute a search warrant in a homicide investigation, they threw a flash bang — also known as a stun grenade — through the front window of the crowded apartment ... onto the couch where Aiyana was sleeping. Aiyana caught fire. As her grandmother tried to put out the flames, police entered, and a gun went off. Aiyana was shot in the neck and pronounced dead at the hospital. Her father, Charles Jones, told the AP that he had to wait several hours to find out what had happened to his daughter.

The police entered Aiyana's home searching for a suspect in the shooting death of Jerean Blake, 17, who was gunned down in front of his girlfriend on Friday. Blake's story is also a tale of senseless brutality, a painful reminder of the domino effect this kind of violence can have in a community.

There's nothing about this story that isn't horrific. It also raises important questions: why are military-type weapons being used in civilian homes? How do we hold law enforcement accountable while remembering their fallibility as humans? What does it mean that these types of crimes disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income communities? How does a family, a community, ever heal from such tragedies? How do we honor memory?

Some people wonder if there will be justice, and the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality has promised to seek an investigation. Some say there isn't any justice in a case like this, that it won't happen.

In case you were wondering, the police didn't find the suspect they'd come to apprehend. They left without their man. And now, Aiyana's family is faced with a life without their little girl.

Photo Credit: handout photo from Aiyana's family

Brittany Shoot is a freelance writer, editor and critic. She's one of the editors of the Feminist Review blog and a frequent contributor to a variety of progressive publications.

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