Yesterday afternoon, at around 3:25 p.m., 18-year-old Kendrick Johnson was shot by an unknown assailant who then got into the passenger seat of a red or maroon sedan and fled the scene. Police are still looking for the gunman, a Black male according to witnesses. Police found Johnson on the sidewalk at 400 N. Denley Drive; they say he died after being transported to a nearby hospital.
If you are not familiar with the address, it is about 0.1 miles away from Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center, specifically the campus’ School for the Talented and Gifted. If you are not familiar with TAG, it is the No. 1 high school in Texas, and No. 6 in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. As DPD and DISD police surveyed the scene, Townview went on lockdown.
I know this because my son goes to Townview (he’s in the law magnet), and, because of a long story I won’t go into, he was coming back to school and happened upon the aftermath. The shooting had taken place maybe 10 minutes earlier; he unfortunately saw Johnson’s body. (My son said Johnson wasn’t alive, but he’s not a cop or an EMT.) Anyway, he got stuck outside of school for a little bit, because of the lockdown. When he told me all this, I went to the Dallas Morning News site to find out more. But all their resources had been marshaled into covering the shooting at Timberview High School. Understandably. There were something like seven stories about that shooting and three pages of today’s issue were dedicated to it.
I learned about the shooting near Townview by contacting the police, who pointed me to this blog post.
All of this may sound like I’m mad at the Morning News for not devoting even 100 words to a killing that happened a literal stone’s throw from the best high school in the state. I’m not. Timberview took priority—you hear about a school shooting and you put everyone you can on it, and then you print whatever comes back. I would probably make the same decision.
If anything, I’m mad at the current situation, where there are simply too many schools on lockdown to cover all of them, and not enough reporters to do it anyway, because they had to take buyouts.
