Not Quite Breakfast at Tiffany's

Dear Tiffany Van Dyke,

Your husband murdered—in cold blood—a confused, aggravated but ultimately harmless young man by shooting him sixteen times as he walked away from your spouse.

Realizing the potential fallout of his actions, your husband's employer buried any and all evidence of the event. His co-workers concocted a lie and submitted it in writing to the Chicago Police Department as fact.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel aided in the cover-up, knowing the dash-cam video was inflammatory and would unite opponents of an overly-aggressive police department. Closer to home, this would also have a negative effect on his bid for re-election.

All was well until the court-ordered release of the video thirteen months after the fact.

It was as inflammatory as your husband, his co-workers and his employer feared. The murder was as brutal as it was senseless.

Even uglier were the lies your husband, his lawyer and his co-workers persisted in. They gave the city and the Chicago Police Department a black eye neither could afford, cementing in the public imagination the idea that our law enforcement feels itself above the very law it was created to enforce.

Your husband's flimsy and preposterous arguments thankfully gave way to justice when he was found guilty of second-degree murder. For a brief, shimmering moment, right appeared to have triumphed over wrong.

At sentencing, your mate dodged yet-another bullet (please excuse the pun) when he inexplicably was handed a sentence more appropriate for car theft. It was a slap in the face to anyone who has ever been a victim of the Chicago Police Department and its over-zealousness.

Yes, the family name has been besmirched. Yes, your husband is temporarily out of a job. But knowing the intransigence of his supporters, I am confident he will have an offer waiting when he walks in just three short years.

Conversely, his victim will be dead forever.

I was hoping we had heard the last of your husband. And of his hideous crime. That we could flush this from our system and move on.

But after being transferred to an out-of-state prison, your spouse was roughed-up by some of his fellow inmates, which unfortunately isn't an uncommon occurrence in jail.

You had the temerity to wail in front of a media assemblage that “...the number-one fear for my husband has always been his safety, that someone was going to get him and hurt him and the worst has happened.”

Interesting words, indeed. 

Has it occurred to you or those mercenaries you have on retainer that Laquan McDonald and his loved ones could have said the same? That you have unwittingly expressed the very thoughts that have been on their minds for the last four and-a-half years?

And if it has, what are your thoughts? What is your reaction?

Tiffany, not to belabor the point, but your husband is a very lucky man. He is serving a soft sentence in a minimum-security prison for a crime that would have netted you or I or practically anyone else a lifetime behind bars.

Please. No more press conferences.

Kindly go away, will you? 


Sincerely,

La Piazza Gancio