Back in August, I wrote about Jomiltron Sentell Fair Jr. from Gaffney, South Carolina. He was the 17-year-old Gaffney High School senior who was shot dead at his own bus stop three days into the school year.
Fair had crossed the street from his apartment to catch the bus like he did every day. A car pulled up, and a male got out and started fighting him. Somewhere in that scuffle, Fair’s backpack got yanked away, and his phone came loose and hit the ground. And then, once the fight was already over, he was shot in the back of the head in front of fifteen of his classmates.
Shooting someone during a fight is one thing, and it’s still monstrous, but shooting someone in the back of the head after the fight has already ended is a different animal entirely. That’s not rage or self-defense.
A warrant for 17-year-old Reginald Louis Barnes Jr. says he’s the one who pulled the trigger. If that warrant holds up, that makes him a coward before it makes him anything else. There is no version of where he shoots a Fair in the back of the head after losing the fight that reads as anything other than cowardice.
Now the story has gotten a second act, and it’s just as ugly in its own quieter way. 59-year-old Reginald Louis Barnes Sr., the alleged shooter’s father, has been arrested and charged with accessory after the fact to murder. According to the warrant, he took his son somewhere to hide from law enforcement in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, then lied to investigators about his son’s involvement, and his son’s whereabouts, and topped it off with an alibi he knew full well was false. This was a grown man making a series of deliberate choices, one after another, to protect a teenager accused of executing another teenager in front of a bus full of kids.
Barnes Sr. was arrested by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). They had been called in to work the case alongside local police. It took the state division of criminal apprehension stepping in to catch a father who’d been actively working against the investigation the whole time.
We spend so much energy asking why teenagers turn violent, like the answer has to be some mystery buried in Discord servers or video games or whatever this week’s scapegoat happens to be. But every so often a story like this one comes along and hands you the answer without even trying.
If the accusations against Barnes Sr. are accurate, this is a father who, faced with the choice between doing the right thing and protecting his son from consequences, chose to lie to the police, hide his kid, and build him a fake alibi. We keep asking why kids grow up to act like violent sociopaths, and then a case like this drops in your lap where the adult in the room responds to an alleged murder by covering it up instead of calling it in.
If that’s the example being set at home, I’m not sure what anyone expected the outcome to look like.
(Sources)
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