Speak No Evil

In case you missed it in the comments, here's a three-part series from the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Joan Garrett McClane: Her son's body was left splayed on a road where the streetlights were broken.

If anyone knew why, they weren't telling.

So Shonda Mason picked through the weeds that climbed over the jagged asphalt. She searched the leafy overgrowth swallowing a fence. She ran fingers over dirt to find the cave of a bullet hole.

She knelt to study the stains on the street.

Bushes revealed nothing.

The blood had washed away.

Rap. Rap. Rap.

She pounded on the back door of one of the houses that butt against the street.

Rap. Rap. Rap.

She imagined eyes behind the peephole, someone peeling blinds apart to see her face. No answer.

A woman drove up next door, and Shonda ran to the car.

"We was trying to find the spot where my son got killed," she said, leaning in through the stranger's window.

"He was laying in the street," the driver said. That was all she would say.

Five months after Shonda's 18-year-old son was found dead, his murder remained unsolved. His file sat within a stack of cases of other dead black teenagers, cases without evidence because witnesses wouldn't talk.