The 395 Kids Philando Castile Left Behind
“Your Life Mattered” hangs on a podium outside J.J. Hill Montessori
School on July 14, 2016, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
It was a few weeks after his death in July 2016 when Sakki Selznick learned that her daughter had been giving imaginary high-fives to Philando Castile.
Castile ― or Mr. Phil, as students at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School would call him ― often greeted students with high-fives while they waited on line to get breakfast in the cafeteria. Now that Mr. Phil was gone, Selznick’s young daughter worried she’d never get one of his famous high-fives again. One evening, she explained, she was thinking about it and she’d started high-fiving the air, hoping Mr. Phil would respond somehow.
snip
Now that Castile’s killer has been found not guilty, the young children are grappling with another uncomfortable truth: The justice system doesn’t always deliver justice.
In a country where many schools are segregated by race and class, J.J. Hill is a small bastion of diversity, a Montessori school that draws from surrounding progressive neighborhoods. About 47 percent of the students are Asian, black or Hispanic, with a number of Somalian and Hmong immigrants. The rest of the students are white. For the most part, everyone gets along, parents say. The fact that this harmonious racial coexistence does not extend beyond the school’s four walls is a reality students had to confront when a cop killed their nutrition services supervisor last summer.
More: www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/philando-castile-school_us_594aaedde4b01cdedeffc8d6?vcc&ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
How do the 395 children understand this and try to heal? How does his girlfriend and four year old daughter ever get over being in that car and seeing a man that they both loved murdered, brutally a few feet from them. I can not imagine the terror that they felt. They will live in a world of nightmares for years to come.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Get thee to the greatest page 
That cops a hero
So many hearts now broken.
BTW how come the NRA has been so silent about a legal gun owner being killed for following the law?
<snip>“I wont lie to you. When I watched this video, it broke me. It just… it broke me,” said Noah, clearly distraught. “You see so many of these videos and you start to get numb, but this one? Seeing the child—that little girl—getting out of the car after watching a man get killed, it broke my heart into little pieces. I thought of every joke people make about, ‘Oh, the most confusing day in the ’hood is Father’s Day. People don’t know where their parents are. Haha. Black dads.’ That’s a black dad that’s gone. That’s a child that grows up not knowing what it’s like to have somebody in their life.”
“You know what’s the most painful thing? For years, people said that there’s a simple solution to a police shooting: just give the police body cameras, film everything, and then there will be no question about what happened,” Noah continued. “Black people have been saying for years: Just give us an indictment. Just an indictment. Just get us in front of a jury of our peers—of our follow citizens. We’ll show them the video, the evidence, and they will see it, and then justice will be served. And black people finally get there, and it’s like… what? Nothing?”
“You hear the stories but you watch that and—forget race, are we all watching the same video? The video where a law-abiding man followed the officer’s instructions to the letter of the law, and then was killed regardless? People watched that video and then voted to acquit?”
“It’s one thing to have the system against you—the district attorneys, the police unions, the courts—that’s one thing. But when a jury of your peers—your community—sees this evidence and then decides that even this is self-defense? That is truly depressing. Because what they’re basically saying is in America, it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because we are black. And that’s the truth of what we saw with this verdict.” </snip>
More hear, and the dashcam video (warning):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/it-broke-me-the-daily-show-host-trevor-noahs-emotional-reaction-to-philando-castile-dashcam-video
