Certain people decorate the exterior of their homes around Halloween time; some make small, token gestures, while others go all out.

On the lawn or by the front door, some properties will have life-sized figures. These can be really creepy-cool, particularly at night, as one stares at them -- just waiting to see if there's life-like movement.

One often gets the same sensation in a wax museum.

In this spirit, a kind-of similar thing happened to me this past Tuesday.

While opening up the Humor section on The Latest, wanting to check out some of the talented opinion writers, my eye caught a BuzzFeed story listed immediately under "The Latest Humor," -- just after I had clicked on a particular opinion piece.

Thinking "What! . . . Did I just see my name," I clicked back, and sure enough, there was a story displaying the mug shot of a young African-American dude . . . with my last name, no less.

It was Halloweenish, evoking the feeling of that front-yard Halloween figure; I didn't just see it move, did I? Or, is that wax figure looking at me?

Anyway, my instantaneous reaction was out-loud laughter. Sometimes, it's good to laugh at ourselves; and the greatest humor can be based on coincidence.

But after I learned that there was an actual female victim who had been murdered, all irony and comedy were cast aside.

In fact, as if this episode weren't awful enough, leave it to the corporate legacy "media" to further ugly things up.

In what sometimes seems like their continued quest for de-emphasizing/denying the occurrence of black-on-white crime, many media outlets (e.g., CBS, Associated Press) have, to date, only shown the dead girl in their headline photos; no side-by-side photos with her deceased assailant, whose image isn't seen until later in the body of the article, in the middle of a video feed . . . or not at all.

 

As mentioned, at least originally, BuzzFeed pictorially showed the full context of the story in its headline.

On a final note, it will be interesting to see how much we hear about this crime from the "Me-Too" crowd. Or from the "feminists."

The unfortunate takeaway from this story is nothing but tragic sorrow -- for the families of both of the deceased. What a waste.