"Mattapan's horror ignored in Laci land"
Great Margery Eagan column in this morning's Herald although it is a pay to read column. Eagan talks about Chauntae Jones, the 14-year-old pregnant Mattapan girl who was missing for five weeks in 1999 and later found dead in a ditch.
The Herald and Boston Globe sued for the release of taped confessions from two alleged killers, one, the father of Jones' baby. The tapes were released this week. But not so amazingly, the Jones case has been ignored while at the same time the media has blanketed the news with coverage of Laci Peterson, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart, and even before that, missing intern Chandra Levy.
"So what is the point here?" asked Eagan. "That some deaths matter more to us than others, obviously. That America, Boston -- even Mattapan, the scene of the crime -- is far more interested in middle-class, good looking, white victims and killers than an average-looking, poor, black victims and killers whose crimes, no matter how brutal, don't seem to shock us much."
Wow.