There’s something happening here...

A post today, “Shrouded Truth,” by Snoopy at River City Rapids, picks at the many loose threads of a story that is bothering me, too. It concerns the strange treatment the incident on the Southside shore of the James River on the evening of July 4th has received by the local press. It's the one in which a group of people in the river were attacked by aluminum baseball bat-wielding thugs.

“... The police say it is not a hate crime or a gang related incident, although I don't see how they can close that book so quickly with no suspects or arrests. What also baffles me is the attackers began by throwing large stones from the bridge - which is generally free of such stones - on to the people below. That makes me believe the attackers got the stones from the rocky hillside nearby and went back on to the bridge to do precisely what they did, i.e. it was premeditated. And they just happened to be carrying baseball bats, too?”

Michael Paul Williams, of The Richmond Times-Dispatch, devotes his Monday column to the fallout from the peculiar tale, “Let‘s get a few things straight.”

Well, I agree with Snoopy, something is fishy about the way this whole thing is being handled. I’ve talked with several friends about it in the last few days, and all of them felt the same way, to some extent -- somebody is moving behind the scene to keep this story rather quiet.

Is this story being underreported for a sound reason? Maybe the motive is well-intentioned. Maybe not. Maybe, since there are no dead bears in the story, it's not seen as important. Nonetheless, I want to know what happened that night. And, I want to know why the media are pretending this story is a minor incident. There’s something happening here...