Corey Jones’ case and the dangers of obeying your lizard brain

Frank Cerabino

It’s easy to make some bad assumptions.

Based on sketchy information, connecting the dots can be trickier than it seems at first.

So in that regard, I’m a little bit like Nouman Raja, the former Palm Beach Gardens police officer who made some quick assumptions about Corey Jones, a 31-year-old stranded motorist waiting for a tow truck during the wee hours of the morning on an I-95 exit ramp.

The undercover officer made all the wrong assumptions when he rolled up in an unmarked white van on Jones and his disabled vehicle on Oct. 18, 2015.

Raja was looking for car burglars in the nearby DoubleTree Hotel parking lot.

Jones was wearing dark Read Frank Cerabino’s recent columns online at clothing. But he wasn’t a burglar. He was a drummer on his way home from a gig, and musicians, like burglars, tend to wear dark clothing.

Jones had a handgun. But he wasn’t an armed criminal. He was one of the more than 1.7 million law-abiding Floridians who had a valid concealed handgun permit.

And Jones was a young black man. Does that figure in? Let’s put it this way, if Jones looked like me, I’ll bet there would have been an extra hitch in Raja’s sudden mental calculations.

But on that lonely exit ramp, Raja’s lizard brain — the part that reacts on instinct — saw a young black man in dark clothing with a gun, and it was all-systems-go for a tragic miscalculation.

A jury will decide whether Raja committed a crime that night. He certainly didn’t help his case by staging a fake shootout scene with his dis- patcher after he had already shot Jones.

I have some limited experience in the folly of quick judgment based on sketchy information.

Several years ago, I was about to go to sleep on Saturday night. It was after midnight, and while turning out the lights, I noticed an unfamiliar vehicle parked near the front of my home.

It was parked as if the driver had intentionally sought to leave it in a place that nobody