Description of white bombing suspect stirs debate about race
When Austin police Chief Brian Manley described a cellphone recording left by Texas bomb suspect Mark Conditt as “the outcry of a very challenged young man,” the remark caused an outcry.
Because the 23-year-old suspect was white, some people questioned whether the same level of compassion would have been afforded a person of color.
“Here you have a case of a young white male who killed and injured people of color, and we’re culturally more concerned about his story, about his life, about what led him to take these lives,” said David Leonard, professor in the department of critical culture, gender and race studies at Washington State University. “It’s a striking reminder of a racial empathy gap that persists.”
For many observers, the comments about Conditt were the latest example in which a white suspect seemed to receive an injection of humanity that is less often extended to blacks, Muslims and others. Conditt kept the Texas capital in a state of fear for weeks, planting five bombs that killed two people and wounded four others.
The community college dropout died Wednesday after setting off a bomb inside his red SUV as police closed in.
Investigators said his motive was still unclear, despite the discovery of the 25-minute cellphone recording in which he talked about the bombs.
U.S. law has defined acts of violence or intimidation linked to foreign groups such as the Islamic State as terrorism. Homegrown extremist groups such as neoNazis and the Ku Klux Klan have not been labeled that way, even if they've employed similar tactics.
Similarly, when Stephen Craig Paddock was identified as the gunman who rained bullets down on a Las Vegas concert last fall, the white retired accountant was characterized as a “lone wolf.”
The reaction media was swift.
“Remember how they talked about innocent black children” like Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice or Freddie Gray, tweeted Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. on social
Those young black males, all killed by police, were described as “thugs” by some authorities.
Some critics have also taken exception to media coverage that included Conditt’s friends and family describing him as kind.
The Rev. Yvette Griffin, a black Detroit pastor, said blacks and Muslims don’t seem to get the same presumption of innocence as other suspects.
“The words are kinder and gentler” for whites, she said.
A woman in Spain died after undergoing a supposedly routine “bee acupuncture” treatment and then suffering an allergic reaction that put her in a coma.
The alternative medicine procedure is more or less what its name conjures up: Instead of a needle, an acupuncture practitioner injects bee venom into the body at certain points. In some instances, live bees are used to sting and inject venom into the person directly.
The case in Spain involved live bees, according to the Journal of Investigational Allergology and Clinical Immunology, a Spanish medical journal. The patient, a 55-year-old woman, had already been going to such bee acupuncture sessions every four weeks over a two-year period to treat stiff muscles and stress, the journal stated.
The woman had no history of other illness, such as asthma or heart disease, nor a history of being allergic to insect bites or bee stings before, according to her case study. In two years, she had reportedly withstood all of her bee acupuncture sessions “with good tolerance,” the journal stated — until her last visit, when she suddenly had an adverse reaction to a sting.
“She developed wheezing, dyspnea, and sudden loss of consciousness immediately after a live bee sting,” the report stated. “An ambulance was called, although it took 30 minutes to arrive.”
The woman was taken to a hospital but died “some weeks later,” the journal stated. During her allergic reaction, the woman’s blood pressure had dropped to the point of causing “a massive watershed stroke and permanent coma” leading to multiple organ failure, the study said.
The report did not specify exactly where in Spain or when her treatment took place.
“To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of death by bee venom apitherapy due to complications of severe anaphylaxis in a confirmed sensitized patient who was previously tolerant,” wrote the report’s co-authors, Paula VazquezRevuelta and Ricardo Madrigal-Burgaleta of the Ramon y Cajal University Hospital in Spain.
Apitherapy is a type of alternative medicine that uses substances from honeybees — including honey, pollen, royal jelly, bee venom and beeswax — to treat a variety of conditions, from pain to arthritis, according to the American Apitherapy Society. Live bee acupuncture is a procedure that falls within apitherapy.
In the report about the woman’s death in Spain, the co-authors said outright that patients should avoid the practice because of its risks.
“The risks of undergoing apitherapy may exceed the presumed benefits, leading us to conclude that this practice is both unsafe and unadvisable,” Vazquez-Revuelta and Madrigal-Burgaleta wrote.