Willy Street cried. Cried like a mother watching her child go off to a foreign war zone knowing in her heart that she won’t see them again. Cried weary and familiar tears.
Yesterday afternoon, our city was shaken yet again by the familiar, devastating rhythm of a fatal police shooting. As a lifelong Madisonian, an attorney who has worked both sides of our criminal justice system as a prosecutor and a defense lawyer, and as a pastor called to care for the vulnerable, my heart breaks for the family of 38-year-old Corey Ruiz. Corey was a human being, a member of our community, a man who was unhoused, and a child of God whose life mattered.
But, as I watched the graphic bystander footage of his death spread across social media, I felt a heavy, deeply rooted familiarity. This tragedy unfolded at the intersection of South Baldwin and Williamson Street—a mere block and a half from where a Madison officer shot and killed 19-year-old Tony Robinson in 2015. It sits in the shadow of where Paul Heenan was killed by police in 2012. The geographic clustering of these deaths is not a coincidence; it is a painful monument to our systemic failures…