Nancy, your moral outrage over people making comments amongst their internet friends while they were understandably in some form of shock is commendable. If we didn’t have people to tell us how we should feel and react to these types of tragedies I don’t what we would do. Also, it is thoughtful of you to withhold the names of people who made semi-private comments. I get that Facebook isn’t exactly a private medium and the people you are referring to made the somewhat dubious decision to include a journalist among their circle of friends. Thus, they should have thought a little more before typing away their sense of grief and frustration but maybe you could be less judgmental.

Facts are facts and as people looked at the limited facts at the time they made their judgments accordingly. For instance, when Mrs. Bashara was found in an unsavory area of Detroit we knew her last location was downtown. Presumably she was on her way home, a carjacking or some other robbery attempt may have happened in Detroit and things went wrong and the end result was what was found. Given the limited facts that were available at that time the above would not have been an unreasonable, or even unlikely, assumption. Since few criminals are commuters we could assume that chain events started and ended in Detroit.

Though, as more facts were brought to light we saw a more complete picture and the previous scenario becomes increasingly unlikely. Citizens don’t have a responsibility to gather the facts before making assumptions. That responsibility falls to police and journalists.

It is completely understandable in my mind that people made judgments, however wrong they may ultimately be proven. I understand this is your soap box, or bully pulpit, and you feel you have a right to cast your judgments down upon people. But, I deal in realities and reality is that when the details were emerging a carjacking gone wrong was not an implausible scenario.

I could go on and support this argument using fact and statistics about why it wasn’t implausible that someone from Detroit, who statistically was most-likely African American, perpetrated the crime based on the first-available facts in the case, but I won’t. Another simple fact of the matter is that you’re here to sell hits and engendering moral outrage about what people (most-likely) wrongfully concluded based on incomplete facts will certainly help you in this goal.

Personally, I don’t think it is paranoia that a community with an average annual income several times that of their closest and largest neighbor view outsiders with some degree of fear. The haves and have-nots have always been trying to retain or alter the equation since the beginning of time. It won’t change in the future and it won’t do any good masking your guilt by casting down condensations from your tenuous perch onto your fellow community members.

I am GP For Life and I approve this message.