This is a tale of another Black boy whose name and wrongful death were never reported in any official document or national media. The policeman responsible was not charged, indicted, or prosecuted. This child’s prematurely snuffed life was not spent in the U.S. but in the Black nation of Haiti, though the U.S. government subsidized his murderer.

In Port-au-Prince on a sweltering day last spring, the collective taxicab I was traveling in turned onto Bicentennaire Street, barely avoiding the prone body of a young teen. Arms thrown out like a startled baby’s, he lay in a pool of blood. I spun around in the seat to look. A Haitian passenger, more accustomed to gritty daily reality, looked at me strangely. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

One truck of Haitian police and two more of UN occupation troops next to the body raised my suspicion, as both parties have been responsible for incalculable harm.

I extricated myself from the crowded cab and ran to the scene. The boy had been shot in his skull and eye. The part of his T-shirt that was not yet covered with blood, which was still flowing from the holes, gleamed white. His mother or sister had surely recently hand-scrubbed that shirt with care.

A policeman told me he had been shot by a “bandit.” A bandit robbing and shooting this boy was implausible: emaciated children from that destitute neighborhood do not circulate with riches. That he himself might have been involved in banditry was equally incredible: plastic flip-flops do not make good getaway shoes.

I began asking onlookers and street merchants if they knew what had happened. But two policemen followed me, and so no one had observed anything. As I continued my investigation up a dirt alleyway, one of the cops asked, “Where are you going?” “Just walking,” I said. “Don’t you need company?” he replied. They laughed.

At a bend in the alley, I ducked behind a tin fence before the police caught up with me and asked a man welding what he had seen. He said the police had driven up and thenthe shots had rung out.

Police brutality is a time-honored tradition in Haiti. Today, under fraudulently elected President Michel Martelly, the force’s killings and abuses — especially of demonstrators, activists, and journalists – are growing. Just this past Sunday, December 14, police attacked anti-government demonstrators in the capital city, killing one.

Credit: huffingtonpost.com