My good internet friend Robert Stacy McCain noted that the local police and credentialed media decided to keep secret the identity of the “suspect” who murdered two police officers and a paramedic on Sunday in the Minneapolis suburb of Burnsville.
Mr McCain noted:
(The alleged suspect) petitioned the court in 2020 to have his gun rights restored, which a judge denied.
However, the Associated Press reported:
The suspect, who officials said had multiple guns and large amounts of ammunition, also died.
Clearly, clearly! this report must be false. Since the (alleged) suspect was legally prohibited from owning or possessing firearms, he couldn’t possibly have had the weapons in question.
The only reasonable answer is that one of the children in the house owned and had the firearms, one of the kids shot the police officers and fireman, and the (alleged) suspect, in nobly trying to shield the children, wound up sacrificing his life.
I started this article early, but put it on the shelf, waiting to see if The Philadelphia Inquirer would update it, but nope, the 8:28 AM EST version of the story is the last one posted. More, it no longer shows on the main page of our nation’s third oldest newspaper, and the newspaper of record for the sixth largest city, and seventh largest metropolitan area in our country. And a site search for Shannon Gooden, made at 4:50 PM EST, the (alleged) suspect, returned nothing connected with this story.
Mr McCain, and many others, have wondered why the credentialed media kept the name, and thus the photo, of the (alleged) suspect under wraps, and many have suggested that it is because Mr Gooden is black, and that had he been a MAGA hat wearing white male, his name and image would have been all over the news. Perhaps that’s true, though there’s at least the possibility that the police were waiting until Mr Gooden’s family had been notified.
But it wasn’t just the Inky which never updated a story to identify Mr Gooden. A Google search for Shannon Gooden, conducted at 5:10 PM EST, returned only one national news source, CBS News, with the story on the first page. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Duluth News-Tribune, both had stories, but they’re local news sources, not national.
Two police officers and a fireman working as a paramedic, murdered, and this story is being quickly memory-holed.