Just like that.
It is a sentence, or at least a fragment of one, that should have a question mark pinned to the end. But I think I have been around much too long to really ever be surprised anymore.
“Give me all your money,” the man .
The young woman, Elizabeth Roach, figuring it all a joke although it was 2 in the morning, but also because it was Boulder, yanked the bandana from the man’s face.
“I’m not (expletive) around. Give me all your money!” the gunman then replied, firing one shot into the air for emphasis, as if the 900 block of Pennsylvania Avenue was some dusty road somewhere in the Old West.
Somehow still not convinced, the woman grabbed the young man she was with, Todd Walker, 20, by the arm and set out.
“Come on, we’re leaving,” she said.
At this point, Walker, apparently also still unconvinced, shoved the gunman, who shoved back.
“This is ridiculous. Leave her alone,” Walker told the man holding a gun.
The gunman raised his gun and shot Walker once through the heart before running south down an alley.
Todd Walker died.
Just like that.
All of it ticks me off. It has since the day I first read it. You have no idea.
Have we really reached a point in our evolution where a young man’s life can be taken so cheaply?
I would pose the question to every politician who mattered, but they retreat, frozen as if truly stupefied, for fear of angering every last gun group and gun lobbyist, who you have to know by now got us here and Todd Walker in the ground in the first place.
Not even the president, a half-dozen people slain in Phoenix and a congresswoman shot through the brain, can muster the courage to at last say, enough.
No one says it, and people continue to die.
I have been grinding on this for better than two decades of column writing now, so I know exactly the argument: The gun did not kill Todd Walker. A stupid criminal did.
Stupid criminals I can abide, sort of.
I cannot and will never abide this society’s turning a blind eye to the very instrument that allows them to take the life of a kid like Todd Walker.
Handguns, and I have said this so many times, are an abomination in this society. They are the preferred tool of the crazed and weak. They believe it gives them power.
They make good people, like Todd Walker, a sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, where he was a business major and played football, easy victims.
And we should talk about the handgun and Tucson.
Did you know that from the January slaughter there until mid-March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 2,405 people in the United States have been shot and killed?
Think about that. How can such a number of gun deaths, such violence, be tolerated?
In the days since Todd Walker’s killing, Boulder police arrested Kevin McGregor, a 22-year-old sandwich-shop employee. He has been charged with first-degree murder, and prosecutors are considering the death penalty.
Yet more killing.
I tried without success to reach Mark and Pam Walker, Todd’s parents. It is never an easy assignment.
Mark Walker, in the Colorado Daily the other day, during the attempted robbery.
“It seems like a really, really silly reason to take a life,” he lamented.
When a handgun is involved, it is really, really way too easy, as well.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
