The Colleague Behind the Homicide Statistic

The Colleague Behind the Homicide Statistic
New America Media, Appreciation, Raj Jayadev , Posted: Jan 28, 2010

Here is what came out in the paper the day after my colleague, friend, and inspiration Albert Cobarrubias was unexpectedly killed in a random act of gun violence. Word for word it read:

“San Jose police are looking for a suspect in the fatal shooting Saturday night of a 30-year-old man, the city's first homicide of the year. At 10:57 p.m., officers responded to a report of shots fired at a home in the 2700 block of Chopin Avenue near Puccini Avenue, in a neighborhood south of Eastridge Mall. Near the garage they found a man with a gunshot wound, San Jose police spokesman Ronnie Lopez said. The man was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Lopez said. Police have not released the victim's name. Police are interviewing people who were gathered at the home and are seeking more witnesses, Lopez said. They have made no arrests.”

Albert was playing pool with friends at a family home, when a strange car stopped in front of the house. Someone got out, walked up the driveway and started shooting. The neighborhood has had a history of senseless, unprovoked, violence.

The newspaper story had a note of who to call at the police department if anyone had information, and in the online version, there was a button to click for an interactive map on crimes in San Jose.
It was a total of 155 words.

I don’t blame the paper for leaving out the remarkable life of Albert in their report; they just didn’t know. What was newsworthy, as indicated by the title, was Albert’s numerical value – the first homicide of the year in San Jose. It is an annual reporting tradition for city papers, like finding out the name of the first baby of the new year.

After being notified that Albert was a graduate of San Jose State University, headed to law school, a former Marine, and a community leader, the media did start to take more notice of his passing, and have been helpful in letting readers know of the person behind the anonymous statistic. But never has it hit me how much is missed in such a common, even routine, marker as "First Homicide of the Year." All across the country this month there were identical headlines as the one we had in San Jose about Albert. Just Google the phrase, and the morbid pattern pops up, showing an understated fraternity of loss that can only grow consistently, every year.

Invariably, in their follow-up interviews they would ask me, ”What was lost with Albert’s death?” I don’t know how to answer that. I am used to writing letters of recommendations for Albert for scholarships, grants, college applications. I am used to describing Albert in anticipation of the great man he would become, rather than reflecting on the great man he was. It should never be that the same words from a scholarship application, the hopeful language of what can possibly be, can also be used in an obituary of what could have been.

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