80 Days and Counting: JFK, Dante and MLK Said It Best

It is Abraham Lincoln's 205th birthday. We need more Lincolns and fewer Nixons.

Not one putative political, business or religious leader in St. Johns County has had a word to say publicly in the 80 days (11.5 weeks) since The New York Times published "Two Gunshots on a Summer Night," on the shooting death of Michelle O'Connell. PBS' "A Death in St. Augustine" followed two days later.

I have not talked to anyone who thinks it was a suicide. Have you?

Our St. Augustine and St. Johns County community is collectively sickened by the fetid, noisome smell and ugly sights and sounds of how our tatterdemalion St. Johns County Sheriff's Department and Seventh Circuit State's Attorney office acted (at best) ineffectually, incompetently, showing misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance.

Those dark corners, the Fourth Circuit State's Attorney, and our County Medical Examiner are, in former President Jimmy Carter's words, "A disgrace to the human race."

These lugubrious goobers covered up this shooting.

Our crooked Sheriff, DAVID B. SHOAR, refused to recuse himself (and then refused to speak to a Times reporter).

They make us all look like hick hacks from a Hollywood movie.

Not in my name.

They all need to be investigated by the FBI, U.S. Attorney and federal grand jury.

I am waiting for the St. Augustine Record to speak out in favor of a federal grand jury investigation.

So who is afraid of Sheriff DAVID B. SHOAR?

Of State's Attorney RALPH JOSEPH LARIZZA? Of Medical Examiner PREDRAG BULIC?

And of all of their works and pomps?
Why?

There are more of us than there are of them -- and this is our time, our place and our government. It does not belong to developers, or crooks. It is up to us.

To the fearful, to the timid, to the tepid and to the ethically impaired and dull-witted among our putative political, business and religious "leaders," three quotes come to mind.

First is from JFK, paraphrasing Dante Aligheri: "The hottest places in hell are resered for those who in time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."

The second, from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Our lives begin to end when we stop caring about things that matter."

The third is from Pastor Martin Niemoller, who said of Nazi Germany: "First they came after the Jews. I was not a Jew, so I did not object. Then they came after the trade unionists. I was not a trade unionist, so I did not oject. They they came after the Catholics. I was not a Catholic, so I did not object. And then they came after me, and there was no one left to object."

Justice for Michelle O'Connell in 2014.