Saturday’s tragic shooting that claimed the lives of 68 year-old Winthrop native David Green and 60 year-old Ramona Cooper, two Black residents of our community who were walking separately along Shirley St. on a placid early-summer afternoon, were heinous hate crimes perpetrated by a 28 year-old white man, Nathan Allen, who was armed to the teeth with two semi-automatic weapons.
The gunman shot them both multiple times, execution-style, with a degree of ferocity that can only be described as maniacal and motivated by sheer racial hatred.
The speedy and effective response by Winrhrop police stopped the gunman in his tracks before he could wreak further carnage, but the damage already had been done, and two innocent persons, both of whom were military veterans and one of whom was a lifelong and well-known Winthrop resident, lay dead on the town’s sidewalk.
Our hearts grieve for the family and friends of the victims. It is unfathomable that two persons could be taken from our midst so cruelly and so suddenly.
We have been covering the news in Winthrop for more than 50 years, but never have we been as horrified and as saddened by any incident as by Saturday’s events — and we have no doubt that all of our fellow residents feel the same way.
Winthrop is not a “small†town in terms of our population (about 19,000), but our land-area of 1.6 square miles make it the second-smallest town in Massachusetts. We often think of our compact, peninsula community as the equivalent of the old TV show Cheers — a place where everybody knows your name — that is isolated from big-city problems.
As all of us have watched on TV the media coverage of the many mass shootings in our country over the years from the comfort of our living rooms, we reassured ourselves with the thought, “It couldn’t happen here.â€
One bystander in the aftermath of the shootings succinctly put it this way to the Boston Globe, “I can’t believe that this would happen in Winthrop. It’s just a calm, quiet place.â€
But the unthinkable occurred without warning on Shirley St. on Saturday.
We can try to convince ourselves that Saturday’s shooting was just some random event. But the reality of America in 2021 is that hate crimes, fueled by the easy access to military-grade weaponry, are now a commonplace occurrence.
Nathan Allen came across other persons on that same sidewalk who were white, but he did not threaten them. He saved his wrath — and his bullets — for two Black persons.
Racial hatred is nothing new in America — it’s as American as cherry pie (in the words of H. Rap Brown) — but incidents of race-based hate crimes have been on the upswing in recent years, not only as to persons of color, but also against the Asian, Latino, Muslim, and Jewish communities.
The greatest threat to the safety of every American exists within our own country from white supremacist groups and individuals. Whether our nation is capable of facing up to the threat of these domestic terrorists will determine the fate of our democracy and our way of life — a reality that struck home on a quiet street in our community on a Saturday afternoon.