The NYT reports on Justin Patterson, a young black man shot to death in Georgia by a white guy who wasn’t charged. The idea here is that the white guy got away with something because there was no media attention, as in the Trayvon Martin case. Excerpt:

Norman Neesmith was sleeping in his home on a rural farm road here in onion country when a noise woke him up.

He grabbed the .22-caliber pistol he kept next to his bed and went to investigate. He found two young brothers who had been secretly invited to party with an 18-year-old relative he had raised like a daughter and her younger friend. The young people were paired up in separate bedrooms. There was marijuana and sex.

Over the course of the next confusing minutes on a January morning in 2011, there would be a struggle. The young men would make a terrified run for the door. Mr. Neesmith, who is 62 and white, fired four shots. One of them hit Justin Patterson, who was 22 and black.

The bullet pierced his side, and he died in Mr. Neesmith’s yard. His younger brother, Sha’von, then 18, ran through the onion fields in the dark, frantically trying to call his mother.

Turns out one of the girls being screwed by one of these guys was 14. And, of course, there were drugs. Plus, it appears that Justin Patterson tried to hurt Neesmith when he confronted them with his gun. Eventually the DA, who was inclined to prosecute, realized that the case looked a lot like self-defense. It certainly does. Mother Patterson believes it was racism, though. She told the Times:

She says things simply do not add up. What made the district attorney change course? And how could her son, who was not even 5-foot-7 and perhaps 120 pounds, be such a threat to Mr. Neesmith, who is 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds?

“If he had just asked them to get out of his house, they would have,” she said. “They are mannerable boys. He took a life he didn’t have to take.”

Oh, please. “Mannerable boys” don’t sneak into a man’s house at night to smoke dope and have sex with his daughter and her 14 year old friend. Neesmith was awakened in the middle of the night, and was probably scared to death. From the Times:

Mr. Neesmith says he felt threatened. He says he aches for the parents but believes none of this would have happened if the young men had not been in his house when they should not have been.

Yep. It is not a good idea to go into the house of an armed man in the middle of the night and do drugs and have sex with his teenage daughter and her pal. That’s the lesson here. Nothing else. Does anybody seriously believe two white dudes who had done the same thing, and knocked around the pistol-packing homeowner in an attempt to get away, wouldn’t have gotten shot?