A uniformed Texas sheriff’s deputy was murdered “execution-style” at a Houston gas station–and his boss is blaming the anti-cop rhetoric of the so-called “Black Lives Matter movement.”
Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth, 47, was filling up his patrol car in a Houston gas station, when a gunman walked up behind him and began shooting. Goforth fell to the ground, at which point the gunman stood over the dying deputy and continued to shoot. The grisly murder was caught by a security camera.
Shannon J. Miles, a man with a long criminal history, has been arrested and charged with Goforth’s murder. A motive for the crime has not yet been established.
But Ron Hickman, the sheriff of Harris County, which includes the city of Houston, said in a press conference that he believes Goforth was singled out because he was in uniform, after months of increasing racial hostility towards police. Miles, the suspected gunman, is black, while Goforth was white.
“When rhetoric ramps up to the point where cold-blooded assassination has happened, this rhetoric has gotten out of control,” Hickman explained. “We heard ‘black lives matter.’ All lives matter. Well, cops’ lives matter too, so why don’t we drop the qualifier and say ‘lives matter’ and take that to the bank.”
The Black Lives Matter movement, which was created after a series of high-profile killings of unarmed black men, has been growing in notoriety over the past few months. And the target of their frustration has been both parties–they famously disrupted a number of events hosted by Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-MD.)
But, as hostility towards cops increase, it’s clear that the calculus might be changing–and now, it may be America’s police officers who are under attack.
