"There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is". Isaac Bashevis Singer

10-year-old Amir Clemons and 7-year-old Gerard Clemons didn't get the chance to play in yesterdays sunshine. There won't be any further chances in the future. While most kids in the metro were busy doing what kids do, Amir and Gerard were two of the victims at the center of a quadruple murder investigation in Raytown. They were killed along with their aunt, Precious Clemons, and an unidentified male. There was an 18 month old toddler who was also in the apartment who was not harmed. While police have yet to give many details there are a couple of things we do know. Amir and Gerard were killed for no better reason than to be kept silent. The aunt, Precious, has a couple of drug cases from June of this year. A class C weed case and a more serious class B delivery of a controlled substance case, per case net. Those charges don't necessarily have any connection to the homicides, but they do tell us that at least at some point, Precious wasn't living right.

We also know that if these two boys had been somewhere else they would still be alive. It's safe to say that two kids who are in elementary school haven't been living on the edge, doing dirt. The Metro Squad is looking for the father of the child who was unharmed. So maybe it all comes down to some kind of domestic dispute, or it could have something to do with Precious previous brush with the law. What ever the case may be the one inescapable undeniable fact is this, once again the innocent suffer. We see these stories on the news and it all seems so far removed from reality. Amir and Gerard's father found the boys, he witnessed the aftermath first hand, for him it is all too real. Think about that for a minute. How will he live with that minute, forever frozen in time, etched in his brain, burned in to his minds eye?

We live in a world where the innocent and vulnerable get caught up in the crossfire of the wicked, catch the eye of the predator, and suffer the end result of someones anger. It takes a special kind of monster to snuff out the life of a child, let alone two children, sadly there is no shortage of monsters in the world. When children meet such a terrible fate, there is one constant, one unchanging fact, people will plead, demand, and pray for justice. The grieving family, the police, the public, will all seek justice in these killings. Sadly there is no justice to be found. Even if the guilty are caught, tried and convicted, justice, true justice will elude them. How do you even the score , right the wrong, reverse the irreversible? You don't, you can't, not in a case like this one involving someone so young. The best any of us can hope for is that the killer is caught , tried, convicted, and hopefully put down. That end result is as close as we can come to justice, but it's a small comfort, an impotent attempt at righting a wrong. In cases like this one, justice is nothing more than a concept. In our so called civilization, the killer will be afforded every right that our justice system allows. If sentenced to death, the appeals alone will buy another 15, 20, 30 years or more above ground, while his victims lay beneath it. That's what passes for justice, in the end it's a far cry from it.