Baby Grace

The little girl’s body was found in a plastic box on a sandbar off the island of Galveston, Texas back on October 29th. The authorities announced the gruesome find and identified the girl as Baby Grace. Based on forensics, an artist was able to make a drawing showing what the little girl may have looked like. The drawing was of a blond headed little white girl. Not quite four weeks later arrests have been made in this case not too far from Galveston up interstate 45 in Houston, Texas.

According to CNN an affidavit from the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office goes into detail on how this little girl was beaten with belts, picked up by her hair, thrown across the room and held under water before she died. The two year old little girl was identified as Riley Ann Sawyers and the people that killed her were her mother, nineteen year old Kimberly Dawn Trenor and her husband, Riley’s stepfather, twenty four old Royce Clyde Zeigler II. A medical examiner said the child’s skull was fractured. Her body was found by a fisherman. She was stuffed inside a blue storage container that washed up on an uninhabited island in Galveston’s West Bay.

The toddler was last seen three or four months before her body was found. After her death, her parents stored the body in a plastic container they bought from Wal-Mart in their garage for one to two months. Then they carried the container to the Galveston Causeway and tossed it into the bay and watched it drift away. Ms. Trenor and Mr. Zeigler were charged with injury to a child and tampering with evidence. Bail was set at $350,000 each.

This case is just one of the more recent examples of the widespread phenomenon of white on white crime. White people are murdering each other, kidnapping and torturing each other, sexually abusing each other in godless ways, robbing and stealing from each other, and making false accusations against each other. There are white people who are neglecting their communities, their families, their children, and themselves. But their crime rarely reflects on others in the white community.

But on the other hand black people who commit crimes are assumed to be the example of standard behavior for black people. When there is a high profile black person accused of criminal behavior he or she sets a poor example for others that has a profound and overwhelming impact on the black community. How many times have we heard something along the lines of the arrest or conviction of so and so leaves a stain on the entire black community? And yet we never hear the same equivalent of these words spoken on behalf of the white community. How many times have we heard that gangsta rap is tearing away the foundation of the black community every time someone in the black community is alleged to be a criminal? But you never hear the same thing said of white forms of music that promote anti social behavior.

According to Mediamark Research Inc, white people support the gangsta rap music phenomenon by purchasing more than seventy percent of the rap music in this country. But no one ever associates this music with the white people who do crime. However, let a prominent African American get busted for dog fighting or be shot to death by a hail of bullets and the first thing some people want to say is that hip hop is killing the black community. Why is it killing the black community when the white community is just as guilty of indulging in this phenomenon? Which music culture is responsible for Riley Ann Sawyers’ murder?

But instead of seeing Riley’s murder as a component of a larger issue associated specifically with the white community everyone is more than ready to just see it for what it was, the heinous death of a little girl. No one is asking what form of music the parents listened to. No one is making claims that this is standard white people behavior. And no one has mentioned that this is another instance of white on white crime. The purity and integrity of the white community remains intact. No one is making plans to move away from the white people who are so violent. No one is going to say property values are dropping because of the white crime phenomenon. No one is writing a book on why white people are violent and/or what white people must do to save their community.

Most people will continue to live their lives in the white community with a business as usual attitude. There will be a little talk and there will be a little gossip about what happened to this little girl. The families of everyone involved has been impacted so of course their worlds have changed. But to the general community this will be the end of it.