Thug:

  noun
1.  a cruel or vicious ruffian, robber, or murderer.

Saint:

noun
1.  any of certain persons of exceptional holiness of life, formally recognized as such by the Christian Church, especially by canonization.
2.  a person of great holiness, virtue, or benevolence.

The Chicago Tribune has published a story interviewing the family of a 16-year-old “ghetto superstar” that got himself shot and killed by police.  In the story, the family tries to turn their “ghetto superstar” thug into a saint.

I have no doubt the Tribune published this pathetic story for readership, because outside the family, I’m not sure how any right-thinking, intelligent person could believe the sewage spewed forth.

Karen Winters knows how easily boys are drawn to a life of violence in the Homan Square neighborhood.

It’s never the family’s fault for failing to provide positive role models for good behavior in a wholesome, nurturing environment with goals of getting an education and working as a productive citizen.

But she still can’t understand how her 16-year-old nephew ended up shot to death after allegedly threatening a Chicago police officer with a gun during a brief foot chase Monday night.

Karen Winters is either willfully ignorant or playing dumb as she wants a part of any winnings the family gets in the “ghetto lottery”.

“Once again, we’re looking at environment, this community, how some of these young boys are just plagued with certain influences,” Winters said Tuesday as relatives consoled the teen’s mother. “But not to this extent, by no means.”

Plagued?  Like it’s a mysterious disease?

Could it be your environment and your community is providing the WRONG influences to “these young boys”?

Police said Pierre Loury was shot as he fled on foot from a car that officers had pulled over because it matched the description of a vehicle used in an earlier shooting.

An autopsy showed the teen suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.

Citing a preliminary investigation, First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante said the lone officer who chased the teen opened fire after the teen turned and pointed a gun at him. A semi-automatic weapon was recovered at the scene, Escalante said.

Anyone want to bet that it might have looked just like this one?

A woman who said she witnessed the shooting told the Tribune the teen was shot as he was scaling a fence.

“They shot him in the air,” she said. “His pants leg got caught on the fence and he hit the ground. If he hadn’t gotten shot, he would have cleared the fence.”

Really now?  Was this woman’s name Rachel Jeantel?

The woman spoke on condition of anonymity, saying she feared backlash from police. She said she had denied to police that night that she had seen anything.

So, either she lied to police or she lied to the Tribune.

But the autopsy shows our little choirboy took a round to the chest, not to the back as he climbed a fence to escape.

Perhaps our Chicago Rachel is lying to both the police and the Tribune?

A law enforcement source confirmed that before he was shot, Loury was trying to hop a fence and that his clothing had become entangled in the fence.

Ha ha.  It’s hard to run with your pants around your knees.

…Loury’s mother, Tambrasha Hudson, her son’s first name tattooed in cursive on her neck, cried loudly on the front porch, tears streaming down her face, as relatives tried to console her.

Her son’s first name tattooed in cursive on her neck?  That sounds normal and well adjusted, does it not?  Or was it so she could remember how to spell “pierre”?

“Everything they said on the news is not the truth,” Hudson said, her voice choked with emotion. “It is not the truth. It’s not the truth.

“It’s sad!” she said repeatedly. “My baby was 16, not 30. My baby was 16! Sixteen!”

Your baby was raised a thug.  Nice job, Tambrasha.

…The family had been mentioned in a 2000 Tribune story about the high rate of truancy at Rezin Orr High School. His mother, then an 18-year-old junior at the West Side high school, said she missed school for a number of days to care for her then-infant son.

…His family said Loury was the oldest of five children, an aspiring rapper who attended Community Christian Alternative Academy in the West Side’s Lawndale neighborhood.

How does one get into “alternative” school?  It’s not by embracing educational opportunities and exhibiting good behavior.

And he was an aspiring rapper.  How sweet.  Translation:  He wanted to be a ghetto superstar, embracing the “thug” culture.  He wasn’t aspiring to college or a job.

“He’s a typical Chicago teen male, no different than any other young man living in this city, facing some of the same challenges and trials and tribulations,” Winters said in the vestibule of the two-flat.

Winters said she found reports of her nephew carrying a gun hard to believe and described his past brushes with the law as “small, minor incidents.”

His auntie found it hard to believe her nephew carried a gun?  Did she never visit his Facebook page?

On Loury’s Facebook page, friends called him by his nickname, “Polo.” Photos of what appeared to be drugs and guns were mixed with occasional inspirational posts about bettering himself.

He frequently posted photos of his outfit of the day as well as new shoes, watches and distressed painted jeans. He also often referred to the Reese Money Gang or RMG, letters tattooed on his neck.

Some videos posted late last month showed Loury hanging out with friends, smoking and counting what appeared to be stacks of money. Loury also talked about having bigger plans for himself, writing, “Thinkin of A Master Plan.”

He had no job, but he had new shoes, new watches, expensive jeans, guns, stacks of money and jewelry.  Did Auntie Winters think that stuff all just got given to him?

Bionca Johnson, who lives on the 3400 block of Grenshaw Street, said Loury had brought her groceries home for her before. Many people in the neighborhood have a “kill or be killed” mentality, she said.

Oh, he was a saintly boy.  More on the “kill or be killed” mentality in a bit.

…She said that people need to stop “knocking down” teens and to put more funding into youth programs, and to create hope for a better life.

More handouts.  She doesn’t mention parents actually raising their children, but instead she wants more “youth programs” – aka government babysitting – to create hope for a better life.  Yeah, that government “assistance” has worked out well.  She’s a slave on the government benefits plantation and she doesn’t even realize it.

“When you look around, what do you got to look forward to?” Johnson said. “Like, am I going to have to live here my whole life?”

If you don’t take advantage of opportunities given to you in the form of education and then apply some hard work, you bet.  You will live there on the government plantation all your life, given just enough to get by and not a nickel more.

Tuesday night, more than 100 people gathered at the scene where Loury was killed for a vigil sponsored by groups including Black Lives Matter Chicago and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. As the time of the vigil approached, a woman tied metallic red and blue balloons to a black iron fence near the intersection of Central Park Avenue and Grenshaw Street.

The crowd chanted “justice for Pierre” gathering near the middle of the street. Some people held up a fabric poster that had faces of young black people who have been killed be police.

Oh, here we go.  Black Lives Matter.  Except when blacks shoot blacks.

Then these Black Lives Matter thugs took young kids onto the Eisenhower Expressway, blocking traffic and further alienating average Americans to their “cause”.

Shortly after 8 p.m., protesters spilled onto the Eisenhower Expressway. Police sirens went off immediately and officers jumped out to try to stop them, but some were already too far ahead. Police vehicles stopped traffic on the expressway, causing a pileup on lanes headed toward downtown.

Violent Criminal Actors

From Dr. William Aprill’s work, and others.

These violent criminal actors are typically criminal age males, just like Pierre.

They are poorly educated, with frequent criminal justice system contacts starting at an early age, just like Pierre.

They have early deviant family and peer associations, and are alienated from normality structures – just like Pierre’s likely upbringing.

They are frequently victimized, mentally and physically.  Mental illness and substance abuse often follow, along with anti-social aggression and impulsivity, especially in kids that have received traumatic brain injuries due to physical abuse (shaken baby syndrome).   This deviant upbringing frequently leads to chemical dysregulation in the brain.    These folks have grossly impaired inhibitory functions – just like Pierre had no inhibitions about pointing a gun at a police officer to attempt to escape from the pursuing officer.

They have nothing in their lives but the prestige of violence.

They are exposed to violence at a young age and learn that they can consume violence or produce it.  (The above quote from the story about the “kill or be killed” mentality.)   They soon learn it’s better to produce violence, because consuming it sucks.

Violent performances lead to prestige.  Even if they lose a confrontation, they gain prestige because they didn’t back down.  Even if they beat down an otherwise helpless person, it adds to their prestige among peers.

People like Pierre aren’t saints.  They are thugs.

They’ll get very indignant (and violent) if you impede their actions or “mess up their deal” with resistance or interference. 

They’ll be physically defensive, claiming that you were about to attack them by merely looking at them.  It’s a “victim initiated assault” in their minds. 

They have a chip on their shoulder.  If you in any way impugn their “prestige” – even through a sneer or other microaggression – it will be taken as a moral imperative for them to act with savage, extreme violence to defend that prestige.

Forewarned is forearmed when dealing with young ruffians like Pierre.