travis parker – the new emmit till

I wrote this a while back

This past spring, on April 20, Travis Parker was murdered
by his camp counselors. Unlike the Missing 18-year-old
woman in Aruba, he was not female, nor did he have
blond hair or light-hued eyes. He was just a 13-year-old
boy attending therapeutic summer camp. The camp,
which is called the Appalachian Wilderness Camp was
run by the Georgia Department of Human Resources.
According to eyewitnesses, participants and the
Georgia Bureau of Investigation, he was physically
restrained by camp counselors and denied medications
that he regularly took for asthma. It was reported that
Parker stopped breathing while being restrained for
more than an hour and a half. The counselors held
him for this lengthy period of time facedown according
to the GBI autopsy, which was the main cause of death.
The six counselors involved were charged with felony
murder, child cruelty and involuntary manslaughter.
Although one of the suspects indicated that they were
only doing what they were trained to do, the five
counselors who were fired withheld an inhaler, kept
him from eating at a scheduled meal time and when
queried about the incident, refused to take polygraph
tests. The strange thing is that after he started having
breathing problems, they called 911. He was still
being restrained during this time and eventually
stopped breathing before the emergency medical
team could revive him. He died the next day at
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston Children’s Hospital.
It is difficult for me to see how such an event
could happen in 2005, especially given that 50
years ago on August 27, 1955, Emmett Till was
beaten and shot to death by two white men who
dumped his 14-year-old body into the Tallahatchie
River in Mississippi. To me, what happened to Till
was the same as what happened to Parker, since
keeping medication from an asthmatic is a violation
of their rights in accordance to the Americans with
Disabilities Act. Neither one of these children deserved
to die while on vacation. --torrance stephens