Cop Killer

There is no doubt that John Lewis is a monster.

On Halloween morning, Lewis shot police officer Charles Cassidy in the head as he walked into the West Oak Lane Dunkin Donuts Lewis was robbing.

Cassidy, a 25 year police veteran and married father of three, died the next morning.

He was the third Philadelphia police officer shot in four days.

Days later Lewis was captured days later at a Miami homeless shelter where he confessed and apologized saying he didn’t mean for any of this to happen, adding to the senselessness of his crime.

But it is now that perhaps for the first time in his life 21-year-old Lewis offers hope. He gives a city in mourning another opportunity, after many tragic moments squandered, to sustain our collective outrage over the city’s gun violence.

Every day in Philadelphia, on average, someone is murdered and five people are shot. Lewis showed us that we cannot contain the city’s mounting bloodshed in black on-black, God-forsaken neighborhoods. Lewis showed us our hypocrisy, that now violence had become something unimaginable, something unacceptable. And he showed us the swarming ills that make violence a breeding ground.

News stories on Lewis’ life highlight a series of failures, and many of those affected by the city’s gun violence resemble John Lewis. He dropped out of Olney High School. He was unemployed. The week before Lewis walked into that Dunkin Donuts his grandmother took him to retailer Forman Mills for a job application. He had a series of drug arrests. He was a single father to newborn baby girl. He had a frustration of a life deemed not worth living. He had easy access to a gun. These are not excuses, but a reality that Lewis brutally shows us we’ve dismissed for too long.