Every now and again I sit down to write something and have to get back up, go look under the kitchen cabinet, and ask Jack Daniel to come out and help me. That’s how it was when I tried to express my thoughts about one of the finest, funniest, most humane men I’ve ever had the honor and pleasure of knowing: Fred Charles Crosby.
Fred’s brother, James “Ricky” Crosby, is the publisher of a weekly newsmagazine where I worked as the editor for a number of years, and Fred sometimes stopped past the office on his way from court. He was an attorney by profession, and a damn good one at that. But more importantly, he was beloved by everyone he worked with on Lakeside Avenue.
I was in the Justice Center one day and just watched as he made his way from the front door to the elevator. It must have taken him 10 minutes to walk the less than 50 yards — everyone was shaking his hand and clapping him on the back. It didn’t help matters that Fred was a world-class raconteur and would often stop to regale someone with one of his side-splitting tall tales. He was one of the few guys I’ve ever met who could get away with laughing at his own jokes harder than anyone else.
Unfortunately, two years ago he lost his beloved wife Carla to breast cancer, and her long struggle with the disease took a tremendous toll on Fred. I know from personal experience how hard it can be since I lost my mate to brittle diabetes more than 30 years ago. Husbands, who innately feel they are supposed to protect everyone in their family from harm, feel helpless in the face of a terminal disease — and then, after the funeral, they can feel unremitting guilt over the fact they could do nothing to prevent the death.
And then they can become suicidal, I know. Fred was seemingly on the verge of putting his emotional life back together when he suddenly died of a what appeared to be a massive heart attack, but those of us who knew him know that his heart just finally broke.
May he rest in eternal peace with Carla.
* * *
Another Tragic Death
Anyone so twisted as to suggest that the horrific killing of Deborah Pearl by Marine Corps veteran Matthew R. Desha was anything other than a tragic mental health issue makes the pain of the incident all the greater. Because Pearl was black and Desha is white doesn’t make the killing racially motivated by any stretch of the imagination. The ex-Marine that exited his overturned vehicle after a car crash with his gun a blazing didn’t see race — his PTSD caused him to only see an Iraqi enemy from his deeply troubled past.
It was a random act of violence, perpetrated on a completely innocent woman by a sick man, a man so sick he once became addicted to heroin as he attempted to self-medicate himself back to sanity. But it never works.
Pearl’s grief-stricken family will have their faith tested in the coming weeks and months in so many ways as the enormity of their loss manifests itself. I simply hope they can find it in their hearts to forgive.
But the foregoing doesn’t mean that the incident is totally untouched by race — few things are in America. Now just imagine for a moment that the races of the victim and perpetrator were reversed: that the shooter was black and the woman was white. Would the media and those who troll it be as forgiving? I would like to think so, but somehow I doubt it.
But PTSD is real, no matter who is suffering from it, and I submit that inner-city youth that act out in violently inappropriate ways are suffering from disorders that are as real as those returning soldiers bring home with them. And only when we begin to view urban violence through the prism of a public health crisis will we begin to finally put forth solutions to solve the deadly phenomenon once and for all.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Dying of a Broken Heart”
Thomas
Mansfield, condolences on your great loss…
You are really speaking truth to power with the following true words:
“…only when we begin to view urban violence through the prism of a public health crisis will we begin to finally put forth solutions to solve the deadly phenomenon once and for all”