A man died on Monday (October 16) by shooting at the hands of a cop when things went wrong during a traffic stop in Camden County, Georgia. Not surprisingly, some on the left are trying to play the race card in the incident since the deceased was a black man and the cop a white guy. But the original footage of the incident has punched a hole in their narrative.
The video footage from the deputy’s dashcam was shared widely on Twitter/X. It shows that Camden County deputy Sgt. Buck Aldridge stopped 53-year-old Leonard Allan Cure for speeding along Interstate 95. Aldridge ordered Cure to put his hands behind his back so as to be arrested for speeding and reckless driving, by which Cure didn’t comply. As Aldridge tried to arrest Cure, he attacked the deputy. The two engaged in scuffle and Cure got to grab Aldridge and tried to choke him. Aldridge managed to get one had free, draw his gun, and shoot Cure.
Before the release of the dashcam video, CBS presented the story from its Cure-centered angle with sympathy and tributes for Cure by different people. The channel’s coverage employed the victim card for Cure by going back a few years to his exoneration from his armed robbery conviction in Florida for which he was sentenced to life in prison but was freed in 2020, 16 years after his imprisonment following his 2003 conviction.
On Wednesday (October 18), when the incident’s footage was released, the leftist social justice organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) jumped on to condemn the shooting as racist and the result of “anti-blackness in policing.”
The Western Journal responded (October 19) by calling SPLC “phony racial justice warriors” looking for another George Floyd incident. But with the video of the incident gone public, left-aligned media continued to phrase the incident in a manner as to exclude Cure from any wrongdoing. For example, Savannah Morning News did not phrase the physical conflict as Cure attacking Aldridge and trying to strangle him. Instead, it wrote that “the two get into a physical altercation. The deputy hits Cure with his police baton and then shoots him.”
The Blaze pointed to this twist in the narrative serving the leftist talking point of racism targeted at blacks and wrote that liberal media ignored critical detail of the incident in their presentation of the story – namely the deputy been in a fight for his life.
While the Reuters report noted nine paragraphs down that Cure died after an altercation, it made no mention of the decedent first assaulting the officer after failing to comply.