The Bike

A bicycle is freedom to a kid. With teachers, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and just plain big people telling you what to do every day, a bicycle is a kid's ticket to ride free.
Is there anything better than pulling out of the driveway, putting the hammer down, pedaling as fast as you can, feeling the speed build, and roaring down the block to hook up
with your buddies?

It might be better on a day when you have a baseball card in the spokes of the wheel.

Or a day when you had to turn handlebars back skyward cause you knocked them down ramping off mounds of dirt at construction sites you weren't supposed to be visiting.

Or possibly the day you get to make fun of the only kid on the street who has a basket on his bike cause his mother makes him go to the store three times a day.

To a kid, a bike is freedom. A bike is life. A bike is your ticket to be a kid forever.

Geontae Glass had the greatest smile a little kid could have. It lit up a room. He beamed.

He had a bike. A bike to ride down the street. A bike to race to his friends house.

A bike to see how fast his five-year-old feet would carry him.

Geontae's bike is at the last place he left it. Leaning on the front porch where he used to live.
He won't ride it anymore because someone beat Geontae to death.

The pictures of Geontae Glass make my heart hurt in a way that only a senseless mindless tragedy can.

The picture I cannot shake is not the snapshot someone took of a young
boy whose life ended far to soon. I have dreamed about the bike leaning against the apartment door. A bike that no one is riding today.

Or tomorrow.

Or the next day.

Kevin Andre Towles is charged with beating Geontae to death. His mother, Shalinda Glass,
is charged with a felony count of hindering prosecution.
It is important to remember that Glass and Towles are innocent until proven guilty.
Fundamentally that is more than a talking point. It is the foundation of how justice is
dispensed in our culture.

For the record, I don't know if they did it or not. They are in the legal system and the wheels of justice are exceedingly deliberate but turn exceedingly fine.

But when they put whoever killed Geontae in jail, I hope they put a picture of his bike on the wall of the jail cell. Maybe it will keep that person up at night.

Maybe it won't.