A police reserve captain is dead, five people are in jail on charges related to his death, after an extensive search turned up his body in a remote rural area, and the national media barely cares.
The Kevin Quick case seems like a made-for-cable-news drama, complete with its own breaking news theme music and endless questioning from the likes of Nancy Grace and Greta Van Susteren of talking-head former prosecutors and defense attorneys who know nothing about the case but still talk ad nauseam about it anyway.
Trying to figure out why the Quick case hasn’t gotten that wall-to-wall coverage, it’s hard to come up with a good reason. One possibility that comes to mind is race: Quick is white, and four of the five people held in connection with his disappearance and death are African-American.
Reverse the polarity, so to speak, make Quick a black cop, and four of the five people involved in his disappearance and death were white, and it’s Katie bar the door in terms of media coverage. It would be assumed right off that the crime was a hate crime, which we bring up here because of a very, very small way our Augusta Free Press website played a role in highlighting a possible racial angle to the actual Kevin Quick story.
An anonymous commenter on one of the stories in our Kevin Quick coverage posted a message that you could only refer to as hate speech.
“Do we really need this cop? Great Job Sheltons for taking out one evil cop. May god bless u! There should n’t be any mercy on these racist, reckless cops.”
This from a reader self-identified as JP20202, who also posted a hateful comment on a story on the Quick disappearance on the website of Norfolk, Va., TV station WAVY.
“One Evil cop at a time. Great job; God may protect you all in Jail!”
Beautiful, right? But one idiot commenter does not a hate crime make, though it’s not hard to imagine somebody in the national commentariat making an issue of a similar kind of comment if it was aimed at a minority.
The other aspect to this story that seems to make it more than ready for prime time is that those charged are also alleged to be members of a gang. Talk about something to eat up time on prime time: gang members kidnap a cop on his way to see his infant daughter, rob him, kill him, leave his body out in the woods and drive around the state in his SUV.
There has been plenty of local and statewide news coverage of the story, which is still developing, meaning to say that it’s still under investigation, still unsolved. With all the charges pending, no one has been charged for the death of Quick, which tells us that investigators still need more information to connect the dots to be able to bring the case to trial and bring an end to the mystery surrounding Quick’s disappearance and death.
For all the ridiculousness that national media coverage can bring to an active criminal case, it also brings exposure that can lead to more information getting to investigators to close the circle on the crime committed.
So bring it on, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. Grab some ratings, and help us get what we need to figure out what happened to Kevin Quick, so we can at least keep the people responsible for what happened to him from doing it to somebody else.
– Column by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
