Freddie Gray

I believe that society let Freddie Gray down. He was born into a difficult situation of poverty, low income, and high crime rates with poor sanitation everywhere. Already being born with a birth defect is challenging enough but having to do it under all of the other circumstances is asking someone to succeed is nearly impossible. While Gray was growing up he suffered from excessive amounts of lead in his body, and living in the home environment it continued to get worse until the amount of lead in his blood before he turned two was seven times the level that is thought to cause permanent brain damage.

To just make his life worse, Freddie was enrolled at a school where they had inexperienced teaching and most of those teachers would be gone from school 10+ days out of the year. The education in this community is very poor and therefore makes it even more difficult for anyone to get out of these bad communities. Freddie Gray was dealt a bad hand by society, but that is no excuse for his actions either. He used illegal drugs and was having run-ins with the law quite often. The suspicion that the police officers had when they arrested Gray were probably justifiable. If Gray was known by name for some of law enforcement, he was probably not completely innocent.

Freddie Gray’s story is saddening that he did not get the chance to live life to its fullest extent. He missed out on countless opportunities because of birth defects, mental capacity, and environment. Although he had all of these mental problems, that does not give him the right to break the law. This is a case of the media trying to spin things in order to get it to sound like our system has a flaw and the police officers were completely in the wrong arresting him. I feel bad for this particular individual but we cannot change the past and hopefully the neighborhoods that have bad lead problems. There is going to be dramatic changes eventually within our society in order to avoid cases like this in the future.