TO LIVE AND DIE IN ASBURY PARK … (Part One)
By Ernesto Cullari
Hardly a night goes by where I don’t hear the rumbling and winding of accelerated engines of police cars and their blaring sirens soaring up Cookman Ave, from the oceanfront toward the downtown area. I often wonder what tragic ending waits at the other end, where the fury of lights and sirens finally come to a crescendo. I was recently enjoying a beer and pizza with my brother at Johnny Mac’s one Friday night, when police cars from every direction converged on the West Side. I paused a moment to acknowledge that such a police response likely meant that someone’s son, someone’s grandson, someone’s brother was laying in a pool of his own blood, as a street that he once played on became the street that he would die upon.
The Asbury Park Sun reports that it was 20-year-old Tyrell Howard that was fatally killed that night. My heart, like your heart, breaks for him and his family. Too many kids are killing other kids in Asbury Park and in cities like ours and neither our families nor our communities are equipped with the proper means to slow the tide of death.
Unless we are willing to change what we demand from parents, unless we alter who educates and how we educate our children, unless we change how we police our neighborhoods and until we change who it is that we accept as role models for our children, we might as well accept that a certain percentage of our boys will simply die too young. At a time when many are about to throw their hands up in the air in defeat, I say it is a time to confront the violence within our community head on.
Posted: September 22nd, 2013 | Author: admin | Filed under: Asbury Park, Ernesto Cullari | Tags: Asbury Park, Ernesto Cullari, Garden State Liberty PAC | 5 Comments »