Of Blood and Ketchup

As a writer, I know or associate with other writers. Some are urbane, profane, funny, some think they can write, but couldn’t write a complete sentence if they tried. Some knew they wanted to write from an early age, others fell into it later in life.

Barry Friedman and I are friends, even though we’ve never met. One of those ‘online connections,’ through a series of small coincidences (an email sports thread, Facebook and Charles P. Pierce’s Esquire blog) along with a few other crazies.

Yesterday, June 9, he wrote a piece on Substack with an acquaintance who happens to be an Tulsa* Police Officer that bore out the truth about the police in modern-day America.

• I always tell him he ended up going to college at the University of Tulsa because of their football team, and settling there, but he insists it’s because it has more parking than New York City, where he grew up. So does Hamilton, New York, but enough of that.

So, with that introduction out of the way, here’s his story, complete with a link to the original piece on Substack.

“It was two days after Michael Louis shot to death Preston Phillips, Stephanie Husen, Amanda Glenn, and William Love at the Natalie Medical Building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the campus of Saint Francis Medical Center, when my friend and I went to lunch. It was in another part of town, about twenty minutes away. The city, like the nation, was still on edge; the city, like the nation, had already moved on. We were sitting in a booth, when a police…