At about 1:30 on the morning of June 3, a San Antonio pig shot into a car with young teens in it. A bullet ripped through the abdomen of the car’s driver, leaving him bleeding and dying. The dead boy has not been officially identified by authorities as of this writing. But a San Antonio TV station said his family identified him as 13-year-old AJ Hernandez.
Exactly what happened in that deadly encounter remains unclear. News reports in San Antonio, which have been picked up by some national media, all echoed the police story. They said that police “were alerted to shots fired” on a street on San Antonio’s West Side barrio, and that they “spotted a stolen vehicle that was reportedly involved in the shooting.” How either of those determinations was made is unknown.
Cops claim the car then “veer[ed] and crash[ed] into a (police) car purposely on the driver’s side.” San Antonio’s chief pig, William McManus, was reported saying that another cop who arrived on the scene seconds after the alleged collision, “saw the crash and shot once into the stolen vehicle, hitting the teen in the abdomen.… Officials said the second officer feared that his fellow officer would be struck by the suspect's vehicle.”
So, even according to the police story—a San Antonio pig arrived on the scene of some sort of disturbance, and, without trying to determine what was happening, without any pause to see who was in the car and if they posed any threat or carried any weapon, without any shouted warning to people in the car—within seconds shot into the car, killing AJ Hernandez.
“I’m in Pain”
One non-cop witness to the aftermath of the events was briefly interviewed by the San Antonio Express News. Jesse Hernandez (no relation to AJ) said he ran outside his home when he heard sirens and a gunshot. He saw police pulling a boy from a car and tearing off his clothes. “Instead of trying to apply pressure, he’s [the cop] pulling [AJ Hernandez] out, trying to search him. He’s shot, you know. He’s not going to be able to grab anything.”
Jesse Hernandez continued, “The little boy was like, ‘Not so rough, officer, please. I’m in pain. Don’t be so rough. It hurts, officer.’” Jesse Hernandez said he streamed the scene on his Facebook page for about 10 minutes before an ambulance arrived. But the Express News reported that the video had somehow been deleted, and Hernandez said he “didn’t know how.” The paper reported that Jesse Hernandez also told their reporter that he is “skeptical of (McManus’s) remark that the boy T-boned the police vehicle. Hernandez said he saw little to no damage to the front of the car.”
Jesse Hernandez said he watched as police searched the car, and said they found no gun. He also told the reporter that “the sound of gunshots is a common occurrence” in that neighborhood, and asked about the murdering cops, “How do you know he [AJ Hernandez] was shooting a gun?” He said the cop who jumped out of his car and shot AJ had “no right to shoot; he was just a kid. I just feel like there was no reason he should have shot.”
By Friday afternoon on June 3, a small memorial for AJ Hernandez had been placed on the San Antonio sidewalk stained with his blood.
A System That Devours Our Youth
AJ Hernandez is now the most recent in the grim and infuriating list of youths gunned down by police in this country. Among those murdered by cop: seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit; 12-year-old Thomas Siderio in Philadelphia; 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland; eight-year-old Fanta Bility in Philadelphia; 15-year-old Stavian Rodriguez in Oklahoma City; 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago; 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio. According to a report in the Washington Post, 112 children were shot and killed by police between January 2015 and May 2021, 66 percent of them Black, Latina/o, Asian, or Native American.
How long will this butchery continue? How many more children and youth will be cut down by the enforcers of the murderous capitalist imperialist system? How much more pain will be inflicted, how many more tears shed? It will continue until we make revolution and put an end to this system that devours our youth.
As Bob Avakian, the leader of the revolution, has written:
...we have two choices: either, live with all this — and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all — or, make revolution!