On March 26th, 2021 chaos broke out in Virginia Beach. That night, there were no less than three separate shootings resulting in casualties and deaths. Afterward, police officer Solomon Simmons shot Donovon Lynch three ties in the chest and leg, killing him. His death would probably have been forgotten amidst the confusion of the night, except that Lynch was the cousin of singer Pharrell Williams.
The celebrity status of Williams has brought a degree of scrutiny onto the situation that few are afforded. Lynch’s father sued, filing a $50 million wrongful death lawsuit. In response, the courts formed a special grand jury. After months in court, they concluded that Simmons acted in “justified self-defense and defense of others,” and cleared him of all charges.
The Night of March 26th
Despite the chaos, some facts are indisputable. There were three separate instances of shooting, a total of over 50 bullets fired. Officer Simmons responded to the first incidents and provided aid to their victims. Around this time, he turned off his body camera. About half an hour later, he heard more gunshots. Simmons leaped into action and sprinted towards the sounds, without turning on his body camera. When he arrived on the scene, he found no active shooters. He did, however, see a man crouched behind a bush and heard him load a firearm. That man was Donovon Lynch. Simmons fired three times. After the shots, officers and bystanders, including Simmons, provided medical aid to Lynch, but he had been fatally wounded. Next to his body, the officers found a handgun legally owned and registered to Lynch. It was indeed loaded.
Lynch Family Disputes
There are plenty of issues of dispute, largely due to the fact that Simmons did not have his body camera on. There are plenty of people who find that in itself to be suspicious.
https://twitter.com/jordannnn_c/status/1376969014967201803
At the same time, others point out that the officer reacted quickly in the heat of the moment and it is understandable that he forgot to turn it back on, if strange that he turned it off at all. Finally, we have the question of whether or not Lynch threatened Simmons. The defense initially claimed that Lynch pointed his gun at the officers, but there was insufficient evidence to prove this so they retracted their statements.
The decision to clear officer Simmons of the charges against him came after reviewing nearly 200 hours of body camera footage from other police officers that night. Eventually, the jury ruled, that even if the gun was not pointed at Simmons, it was not unreasonable for the officer to assume that Lynch posed a threat to bystanders in the vicinity, given the outrageous amount of violence present that night.
The Tragedy of Donovon Lynch
By all accounts, Donovon Lynch was an upstanding and upbeat citizen. He played offensive lineman for the football team at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and graduated in 2019. The head coach at UVA-Wise, further praised his character, mentioning that Lynch had been taking cooking classes taught by his wife.
But a local minister from the city, Gary McCollum, believes that the court deliberately “impugned” Lynch’s character. He says the court made an unnecessary amount of remarks pertaining to Lynch’s size and BAC at the time. On the 26th, Lynch had reported going out to eat with one of his friends at a bar. The kind of thing a normal person would do. Upon hearing the insane amount of violence occurring around them, the two decided to leave the bar. Following the same logic as officer Simmons, is not unreasonable for Lynch, being a registered gun owner, to prepare to defend himself.
“The second amendment applies to everybody,” McCullom told The Daily Beast. “If you are licensed to carry a weapon and you hear 50 shots go off and you have a weapon on you, which you’re legally allowed to have, what would you do?”
It was on the way to the car that Lynch was shot.
The 2nd Amendment
This incident highlights a considerable problem with gun laws in our country; it is really really hard for a police officer to tell the difference between a “good” guy with a gun and a “bad” guy with a gun. When an active shooter is present, there isn’t time to stop and talk things over. As a result, good-intentioned vigilantes often ended up shot by police. However, many people on Twitter are comparing the response to this expression of the 2nd Amendment with another…
Did race place a factor in Lynch’s shooting? It is hard to tell; both Donovon Lynch and officer Simmons are black individuals. In fact, it has even been reported that Simmons and Lynch went to high school together and were friendly. Sadly, whenever guns are involved people often take a “shoot-first, blame-the-victim-later” mentality.
As for Pharrell? He wishes that the leaders of Virginia Beach would express the same amount of concern about the deaths of their citizens, as they did when he announced that he would no longer be holding his music festival there due to the “toxic” conversation surrounding Lynch’s death.
by Chris Colasurdo
@cfcolasurdo on Twitter
