I didn’t get to com­ment on this imme­di­ately as when I first heard of it, I was on my way out on sea tri­als and was gone until Sat­ur­day morn­ing.  Since then, I’ve been try­ing to read up on the story and get some facts.  And that’s all I’m going to com­ment on right now — the facts.

Here’s what we know so far:  At 5:34 a.m. on Mon­day, Decem­ber 8, George County Sher­iff Depart­ment offi­cer Joe Sul­li­van sees a red truck run a red light, headed south through the inter­sec­tion of Win­ter and Church streets in Lucedale.  The truck pulls in to the Ben­ndale Car­pet park­ing lot after run­ning a stop sign, and the dri­ver — Billy Joe John­son — gets out and approaches the offi­cer.  Billy Joe tells the offi­cer he’s on his way to see his sick mother and that’s why he ran the light and stop sign.   The offi­cer asks for his license and tells Billy Joe to sit in his truck while he checks it out.

As the cop returns to call in the license, he hears a gun­shot and glass break­ing.  He then sees Billy Joe fall to the ground and the weapon fall on top of him.  He then advises the dis­patcher to send help; the sub­ject just shot himself.

That’s a syn­op­sis based on the inci­dent report filed by the offi­cer.   (Here’s the inci­dent report.)  All we know is a young man is dead.  The fam­ily wasn’t sat­is­fied with the inves­ti­ga­tion, so they call in the NAACP, and now — accord­ing to this story — they are “soothed”.  I’m not a con­sipiracy the­o­rist, so I’m not going to say the offi­cer shot the foot­ball player.  I’m going to say that he’s inno­cent until proven guilty.  It very well could be that Billy Joe had a loaded weapon in his vehi­cle and was try­ing to unload it when it dis­charged.  It could be that sim­ple.  But we won’t know until the inves­ti­ga­tion has been com­pleted and the autopsy report is com­pleted.  So all you local yokels out there — please don’t spec­u­late.  Let the author­i­ties do their jobs.  And a word of cau­tion to the NAACP — don’t turn this into a race issue.  Right now it has noth­ing to do with race, and the only way it could is if you make into one.

My prayers are with Billy Joe’s fam­ily, as well as the offi­cer and his fam­ily — no, every­one involved.  This is a sad sit­u­a­tion, and it’s a shame this young man is gone.  He had a promis­ing future.

More on this as I find out.