Philadelphia police officer Robert Ralston reported last month that he had been shot by an unidentified Black man (how convenient). But his story slowly began to unravel. Luckily with today's forensic technology and with good investigative work, the truth usually comes out in these cases. It turns out that Ralston made up the whole story. Fortunately no one was hurt during the manhunt for the suspect who didn't exist.
I was immediately reminded about Susan Smith who drowned her children in 1994, and then blamed it on a Black man. I was also reminded of a case that was worse than the Susan Smith debacle - the case of Charles Stuart, who murdered his pregnant wife in Boston back in 1989, and blamed a Black man (remember that?). That case almost ripped Boston apart. There have been other lesser known examples of this over the years, but these are the two incidents that always come to mind for me because they are seared into my brain.
