One Sin of Commission and One of Omission [Updated]

If anyone's confused whether there are evil people in the world (my last post, for example), look no further than this. This is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read:

A day after a double homicide took the lives of a 7-month old baby and his young father, detectives announced the unthinkable Saturday: the infant had not been accidentally caught in gunfire but was intentionally shot, execution-style, in his car seat.

Seconds after shooting down 21-year-old Sean Paul Aquitania during a suspected home-invasion robbery in southeast Sacramento County Friday afternoon, two suspects fled the house, authorities believe. They stopped just long enough at Aquitania's Chevrolet Malibu to fire a single bullet into the head of the man's infant son, Sean Paul Jr., before disappearing.

By Saturday, the suspects had not been located.

The second half of the story can be read if you register with the site, but it's not necessary; it simply provides a little background on the surviving family members.

Why in God's name would anyone execute an infant? He wasn't involved in the robbery/drug sale/altercation, or whatever the case may have been. He was also too young to possibly serve as a witness or testify against anyone. A child that age is completely helpless and completely innocent, which is what makes a crime like this so much more abhorrent than your typical homicide. The father was also very strongly committed to his son; Fox News reports that he had the baby's hand and footprint tattooed on his forearms.

The only motive I could possibly think of, is that the baby was either shot out of pure spite against Mr. Aquitania, or it was done for the sheer thrill of it. This is an evil act, and the men that committed it are evil. I would like to see anyone try to defend this act or describe it in any other way.

There's also something else disturbing about this case.

There is a huge gap in the Sacramento Bee's reporting. Here is their description of the suspects:

-- one of whom reportedly was wearing a black, hooded sweat shirt, the other, a green shirt and a green Oakland A's hat.

An earlier article from the Bee said the same thing:

Authorities described one as an adult wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, the other as an adult wearing a green shirt and a green Oakland A's hat.

That's it. Notice anything missing here? The description is of their clothes only. No mention of age, gender, height, weight, or - heaven forbid - race!

Why is that? Some of that information is certainly available. On the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department web page (which came out more than a full day before the article), they describe one suspect as a black male, the other a Hispanic male.

Granted, in California, that doesn't narrow the field very much but it is better than no description at all! Someone may happen to know a black and a Hispanic man who were out together that night and put two and two together from the other clues available.

There are plenty of angry remarks about this omission in the newspaper's comment section. I don't enjoy accusing the paper of pandering to political correctness, but I can't see any other explanation here. If we were only talking about a misdemeanor, that would be one thing. But when we are talking about two murderers on the loose, with the public at large in danger, it not only defies all common sense but it is essentially journalistic malpractice and a serious breach of their public trust to keep information like this from the public.

If you are as disturbed as I am, you can let your feelings be known. The author of the article is "Kim Minugh", and she can be reached at (916) 321-1038 or kminugh @ sacbee.com. She appears to have a college web site with photos that she set up here.

I wrote her the following letter:

To Kim Minugh,

My name is John Rohan, and I am the author of the "Shield of Achilles" web site. I also have previous experience in law enforcement. I read with interest your article "Baby intentionally shot in head" and "Baby's killing shocks, angers", about the tragic case of the father and baby Aquitania.

I just have three questions that I would really appreciate if you could answer for my readers:

1) Why was so little information given about the description of the suspects? You only wrote that the suspects were wearing: "a black, hooded sweat shirt, the other, a green shirt and a green Oakland A's hat". There was no mention of either gender or race, even though the information was already available, and even publicly posted on the Sacramento County Sheriff's web site more than a day earlier.

2) Was this an accidental omission or is it a policy of the Sacramento Bee to not mention this information? If it is the Bee's policy, can you please provide the text of the policy or a link to it?

3) Finally, if it is the Sacramento Bee's policy to omit describing suspects by gender or race, don't you think this is hampering the efforts of citizens to aid in identifying suspects, therefore putting the community at needless risk?

Thank you for your time. I eagerly await your reply.


JR

UPDATE 19/09/2007 03:58:00 PM:

I received the following reply from the author of the article:

Hi John,

Thank you for writing. There has been a great deal of discussion at our paper in regards to this story and this issue. However, the decision not to report on the suspects' race was not made by myself, so I don't feel I can best respond to your email. Please await an email from an editor.

Thanks very much,

Kim

So if the author didn't make that decision, that means that someone else, likely an editor, did. I have not received a response yet.

However, since I wrote this, two other stories on the case were printed in The Sacramento Bee. One titled "Slain dad's last-gasp fight", and another "Mom, 19, grieves for infant son, sweetheart". These articles are even worse; they are flat out wrong (I'll avoid the word "lying" for now) about the information offered by authorities:

Authorities on Sunday would only release minimal descriptions of the suspects, offered by the home's residents: one was wearing a black, hooded sweat shirt, the other, a green shirt and a green Oakland A's hat.

That statement is simply not true, as I showed previously. The Sheriff's department had publicly announced that one was a black male and one a hispanic male. And what's really ironic, is that they plead for the public to help:

[Sheriff's homicide Sgt] Wyant stressed that he's hoping anyone who has any information about the double homicide will come forward.

...Anyone with information about the case can call sheriff's officials at (916) 874-5115.

One commenter at the site puts it succinctly:

A lie of omission is still a lie. It's amazing irony how this article speaks about the people at that house not being forthcoming with information that would help identify the killers while this paper does the exact same thing. I'll let the editors chew on the ethics of their decision to help these people go uncaught.

If The Bee continues to leave out important information such as a person's race in a search for suspects, what other information can we assume they leave out? What's the point of telling us what they were wearing? They can change clothes easily, but they can't change their whole physical appearance without a great deal of work.

The author of the two more recent articles on the case was a Christina Jewett, at cjewett @ sacbee.com. Today I wrote her the following letter:

To Christina Jewett,

My name is John Rohan, and I am the author of the "Shield of Achilles" web site. I also have previous experience in law enforcement. I read with interest your article "Slain dad's last-gasp fight" and "Mom, 19, grieves for infant son, sweetheart", about the tragic case of the father and baby Aquitania.

I just have a few questions that I would really appreciate if you could answer for my readers:

1) Why did you obfuscate the information about the suspects? Was this deliberate or accidental? You wrote: "Authorities on Sunday would only release minimal descriptions of the suspects, offered by the home's residents: one was wearing a black, hooded sweat shirt, the other, a green shirt and a green Oakland A's hat." This is simply untrue, since the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department publicly provided both the gender and race of the suspects on their website more than two days earlier: http://www.sacsheriff.com/media/0914_double_homicide.cfm

2) If it is the Bee's policy not to mention gender or race of suspects, can you please provide the text of the policy or a link to it? If this was simply a decision made for this article, can you explain the reasoning behind this? Also, why did you imply that it was the authorities who failed to provide more information?

3) Finally, if this was a deliberate omission, don't you think this is hampering the efforts of citizens to aid in identifying suspects, therefore putting the community at needless risk? This especially seems strange since one of your articles was headlined with "Police cite lack of witness cooperation". Shouldn't your paper also provide as much cooperation as possible?

Thank you for your time. I eagerly await your reply.


JR

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