Highland Park carnage happened because killer's kin didn't think it could | Weathersbee

The tattoos on his face should have been the first sign.

But for whatever reason, the people around Robert E. Crimo III, 21, who now faces seven counts of first-degree murder on charges of wielding an AR-15 and transforming a celebration of the nation’s birthday into funerals for seven people in Highland Park, Illinois, didn’t see it coming.

I say they didn’t want to see it.

Because if they had, they’d know that facial tattoos, according to Science Daily, have been linked to antisocial personality disorder.

And, if the face tattoos didn’t register, the two times in 2019 when Crimo threatened to kill himself and take some family members with him should have. Should have registered when the police found 16 knives, a dagger and a sword at his home.

Should have registered enough to stop his father, who owns a deli in Highland Park and once ran for mayor, from sponsoring his application for a gun permit three months after his tirade.

Then, this past Independence Day, Crimo, after adding an AR-15 to an arsenal of five firearms, turned what was supposed to be a happy time into heartbreak.

Besides killing seven people – including the parents of a 2-year-old – he wounded 45 people, and turned a holiday that will now, at least in Highland Park, be associated with the worse of America, not the best.

Yet as Highland Park residents, politicians and pundits decried the mass shooting as a tragedy that wasn’t supposed to happen in their tony neighborhood just outside of Chicago, they inadvertently show why threats posed by men like Crimo tend to be missed.

They’re missed because the potential for violence by young white men is not taken as seriously as the potential for violence in young Black people.

From USA TODAY: Four members of one family were shot during the Highland Park shooting. They all survived.

Suspect: Highland Park shooting suspect confessed to rampage, remains in custody without bail

Even though, according to research by Politifact, most mass shootings have, at least since 1982, been committed by white males.

According to news reports, those who knew Crimo described him as a quiet kid who kept to himself. One friend described him as weird. His uncle, Paul Crimo, said he saw no warning signs, while Crimo’s father, Bob, saw the warning signs and signed off on his gun purchase anyway.

I guess threatening to kill one’s family was, to them, just growing pains.

Yet when it comes to Black youths, any signs that are viewed as threatening or antisocial easily morph into law.

One example: Shreveport, Louisiana, doesn’t have a law against facial tattoos, but from 2007 to 2019 it had a law against sagging pants. Black men made up 96 percent of the arrests, and the council only repealed the law after a police officer shot and killed a man who he was trying to arrest for wearing them.

No matter that sagging pants aren’t a sign that the wearer is predisposed to criminality.

And, just two years ago, as largely peaceful protests over the slaying of George Floyd erupted around the nation and Tennessee, Rep. Bud Hulsey, R-Kingsport, who said he was concerned about demonstrators covering their faces, tried to get a law passed that would ban the wearing of hoods in public.

That law, however, would have disproportionately targeted Black people, who, while they don’t wear hoodies more than white people, tend to get stereotyped more because of them. When George Zimmerman stalked and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 in Sanford, Florida, he implied that Trayvon’s hoodie made his suspicious.

And in 2018, a Black man was arrested at Wolfchase Galleria for allegedly violating a no-hoodie policy that wasn’t clearly spelled out in the mall rules - and former Commercial Appeal reporter Kevin McKenzie was arrested for filming the arrest.

No matter that hoodies are worn by virtually everyone – not just those trying to cover their faces to commit crimes.

Then, there’s the disproportionate discipline in schools. A 2014 federal study cited in The Atlantic found that Black youths are suspended from school at three times the rate of their white counterparts for similar infractions.

All of this sheds light on how Crimo, with his face tattoos and a history of violence, could get his father to sign off on a gun permit and law enforcement literally brush off his past behavior, while police in Akron, Ohio, peppered 25-year-old unarmed Jayland Walker with more than 90 bullets during a foot chase on June 27.

Highland Park shooting: Highland Park rallied to help toddler after his parents were killed. Now they've raised $2 million.

More coverage: The band struck up a joyous tune as they traveled in the parade. Then the shooting started.

That egregiousness has not gone unnoticed by Black Twitter.

Crimo, who was taken into custody without incident, gets the presumption of harmlessness, while Walker and other Black youths, get the presumption of dangerousness.

That’s how white, mass shooters like Crimo shock people by committing carnage in seemingly safe places like Highland Park. They get underreacted to because people don’t believe such horrors can happen there.

But they can. And they do.

And these tragedies will continue not simply because of the lack of a law banning purchases of high-capacity weapons, but because dangerous behavior by white males isn’t viewed through the same lens as stereotypes about Black people.

Until it is, people will continue to miss the clues presented by the Crimos of this nation. Even though they were written all over his face.

Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter: @tonyaajw

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Highland Park shooting shows how white male dangerousness is ignored