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Dear Editor:
Fifty-one weeks ago, we were thinking of the upcoming “Covid Fourth of July Weekend.”
Fifty-one weeks later, July 5 will be the first anniversary of the assassination of a young 24-year-old mother of a 3-year-old son who said “All Lives Matter” to a BLM supporter who said Black Lives Matter. He killed her because she said those words.
Jessica Doty Whitaker’s family just had fireworks at her mom’s house and Jess decided to enjoy a walk along the Canal. Jessica was white, her fiancé Hispanic, and their two friends: one Hispanic, another Black/White.
I said a year ago this murder was an assassination because this act was a political killing.
On the night of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, arguably the rawest moment in the wound of America’s racial divide, it was the words and empathy of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a white multimillionaire running for president who stood in an Indianapolis park on a truck bed and said, “… what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
Let us put life into those words now, let our One Human Race work together to bring justice for Jessica.
I urge our current Senators Young and Braun to join me in demanding the FBI to enter this case now. Jessica’s family called for help last summer in finding the killer: IMPD, nothing. State Police, nothing. FBI, nothing.
In his 1963 book, Letter from Birmingham Jail, our pastoral brother Martin Luther King wrote, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
#JusticeforJessica. Let me add justice also for you and me, the citizens of a nation where freedom of speech, especially political speech should be held with reverence.
On July 5, 2021, join the family and please say a prayer for Justice for Jessica because God says All Lives Matter too. godsaysalllivesmatter.com
Rev. Mark J Powell, M. Div.
2022 Libertarian United States Senate Nomination Candidate
Whiteland