Laws without comfort of safety

We have laws to try to bring order to our lives and to try and banish deviant behavior. This establishes a common code of conduct by which we all agree to live and delegitimizes revenge and vigilantism. Yet, these laws and rules fall short of protecting us from unfathomable evil and expose a rot in our community.

Kingston Frazier should be alive today. His mother, unwisely, left her 6-year-old son in the backseat of her Camry, with the car running, while Ebony Archie ran into her local Jackson, Mississippi, Kroger’s at 1 a.m. to buy party supplies for her son’s graduation from kindergarten. She had picked up her little boy from a grandmother’s house after going out with friends to celebrate her birthday. No need for the rest of us to judge her, as she has been inconsolable.

Still, making the theft of her car so “easy” for three heartless young men is no justification for her son to be shot multiple times in the back seat of her Camry abandoned in a ditch. According to police reports, there was no plan or scheme, just three teenagers pulling into the parking lot where they saw a driverless car running and ripe to be driven off. The gun used to shoot Kingston has not been found and we can expect that the 19-year-old, Byron McBride, will face the death penalty; the other two are not yet 18 and the death penalty may not be used on a minor.

Children are so innocent, not yet scarred by life; why do they have to die such senseless deaths? What drives anyone, let alone three young men still developing the internal restraints of an unformed brain, to rob an angel of life? Moreover, how did these miscreants get their hands on a gun? Questions without answers.

Right here in Houston County, real life court drama has played out. Deondray Darnell Yarn was recently convicted of committing another senseless murder. It took a jury only 90 minutes to find him guilty and reduce his chance to zero of ever seeing the light of day again. Yarn was only 18 years old when he was involved in killing another man.

This all unfolded three years ago, January, when Monnie Joseph Brabham IV and his friend, LaJerrious Barfield, were stalked at a local Zaxby’s and then a Murphy USA gas station on Booth Road. Yarn and his cohorts had been ordered by a gang kingpin (serving time in prison) to kidnap Mr. Barfield, presumably because he had tried to leave their gang for another. They set up an ambush and were planning on torturing Mr. Barfield, when Mr. Brabham was unintentionally killed, as he struggled in a bungled kidnapping attempt. Jurors were able to watch most of the murder on camera from a vehicle dash cam and the Murphy’s store surveillance video.

These are bad people. Three of Yarn’s associates have also been convicted of a separate gang-related kidnapping (after Mr. Brabham was killed) of Frank Jansen, the father of Wake County Assistant District Attorney Colleen Jansen. Kevin Melton ordered Ms. Jansen killed, from the confines of a federal prison, because she had successfully prosecuted him.

Laws provide no solace for Kingston’s family; they do not bring him back to life. The same is true for Mr. Brabham, even though there is at least a whiff of him not being so innocent. Laws cannot protect us and our loved ones from tragedy, even if they give us relief and an outlet for our grief when ill is done.

It is pretty clear, in the case of Mr. Brabham, that he had formed associations with some bad people and that he was a victim of some sort of gang war. In this sense, while his death was senseless, we might judge him by these unnecessary risks by association. Because the bad people were prosecuted, his family and friends need not hunt down his killers for revenge. That’s a positive. But, maybe, criminal laws desensitize all of us. The malevolence of Byron McBride or the mindless subservience of someone like Deondray Darnell Yarn is pushed aside to the fringes of society. We hold these miscreants responsible for their failings without seeking answers of what made them such monsters.

This does not mean that any of these bad actors deserve our sympathy; they are not victims. And, Deondray Yarn was old enough to make independent decisions about right and wrong. Yet, almost all of the criminals involved in these twin tragedies were 19 years old or younger. They all are, or probably will be, convicted of being outcasts, killed via a death sentence or banished to a prison that will wall them off from the rest of us. We judge and eradicate, without paying attention to the cause, the access to weapons at a young age or that young adults are rendered so hopeless; they feel enough ostracism from regular society to act without thinking.

In this sense, our criminal laws give us a false comfort that our little world is safe. True safety only comes from eradicating hopelessness before it seizes into murder. While deviancy need not be accepted as “ordinary,” maybe we could do more to stop it. Maybe we need to ask more of ourselves and our elected representatives beyond passing more laws and tougher sentences. Maybe shocking and heart-rending murders should cause us to pause and ask “why?”

Local attorney Jim Rockefeller owns the Rockefeller Law Center and is a former Houston County chief assistant district attorney and a former Miami prosecutor. Visit www.rockefellerlawcenter.com to submit confidential legal questions and to review former articles and frequently asked questions.

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