10:00am | No matter exactly what happened, the death of 10-year-old Joanna Ramos is a tragedy. But there’s no call to make it worse than it is — unless you let sensationalism get the best of you.
I’m thinking about Kirk Hawkins, a CBS2 news reporter who announced to the Southland yesterday that “the Coroner’s office is now ruling this a murder.”
That is flatly untrue because coroners don’t make such determinations. They sometimes attribute deaths to homicide — as is the case with Ramos — but not murder.
According to the Lt. Fred Corral of the Los Angeles Department of Coroner, “homicide” is defined as “death at the hands of another.” The deaths of John Lennon and boxer Duk Koo Kim were homicides; Mark David Chapman is a murderer, but Ray Mancini is not.
This is not to say one way or the other whether Ramos was murdered. That is a determination to be made by the legal system. But as of now the 11-year-old whose blow is said to have killed Ramos has not been charged with anything, let alone murder. To broadcast information to the contrary is unconscionable, whether the report came by way of sensationalism or sloppy semantics.
If the information that’s come out thus far is accurate, it appears this was a one-minute, consensual fistfight between children. It’s stupid behavior that should be counseled against and suppressed wherever possible, but it’s common enough that most people reading these words can recall engaging in similar behavior at least a couple of times. And in that childhood recollection you are unlikely to find murderous intent.
Maybe the death of Joanna Ramos really is a case of murder. Perhaps reports that this was a consensual, one-on-one, weaponless altercation will prove false. But for the sake of argument let us assume what we’ve heard thus far holds up to scrutiny, and that an 11-year-old girl got in a run-of-the-mill fistfight with a schoolmate over a boy, that she punched her rival in the face, and that punch caused this terrible loss.
I don’t know the girl threw the punch; I don’t know what she was thinking. But I imagine ending the life of her opponent was not her intent. I doubt the possibility even flickered in her consciousness.
What I do know is that she will live the rest of her life knowing that her actions, however unintentionally, resulted in the death of a little girl. That is enough of a burden to bear without media members piling on false claims that the coroner has determined murder is in the mix.
Maybe part of the news game is to tell good stories so people will tune in to our coverage. But we must be circumspect in our reportage, particularly when the issues are so serious. In our profession sometimes people will say “murder;” there is never an excuse ever to say it for them.