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Six-Year-Old Logan Tipton’s Funeral is This Morning
As I write this on Friday morning, the town of Versailles, Kentucky, near Lexington, is getting ready to say goodbye to Logan Tipton. Here’s why:
According to court documents, the intruder, later identified as 32-year-old Ronald Exantus wandered around the home before walking up the stairs and stabbing a sleeping six-year-old boy several times in the head “with a large kitchen knife that he obtained in the house.”
The boy was identified as Logan Tipton, a student at Simmons Elementary School in Versailles.
Court documents show Tipton’s 11-year-old sister woke up, saw Exantus in the bedroom, and started screaming and trying to fight him.
The police report says Exantus confessed to stabbing the boy during an interview with detectives.
I’m not a parent, but there is no way I can wrap my head around how his family deals with this. To lose a child is one thing, but to lose a child in such a horrific manner has to take the aftermath to stratospheric heights.
All week, I have been tweeting about Logan, doing my best to make sure people read and share his story. I seem to have utterly failed. If you look at the hashtag #LoganTipton, it’s mostly tweets from me. I have been completely frustrated, and increasingly angry, that so few care about this boy or what happened to him.
The Lexington media, of course, has covered the story extensively, as its counterpart in Indianapolis, where the killer is from. The national MSM, however, has largely been silent, which I have pointed out numerous times this week. People have responded to me about media narratives, and how since the killer was black, they don’t want to deal with the racial aspect of the story. Others have callously told me that people are killed every day, and not every murder makes the news.
Regardless of why, Logan’s story is one that should have made national news, and it hasn’t. The one exception has been HLN’s Nancy Grace, who devoted a segment of her show to Logan:
She also tweeted this on Wednesday:
A 6-yr-old little boy asleep in his bed allegedly stabbed to death by a home invader. I demand #Justice4Logan!
— Nancy Grace (@NancyGrace) December 10, 2015
Yet, even after telling what happened to Logan, and while she has 453,000 followers, it only got 25 retweets as of this writing. Depressing and unacceptable.
Logan’s funeral is today, so this post is my one last ditch effort to get people to learn and care about what happened to this innocent boy, in his sleep. The services actually began yesterday:
Hundreds begin to say goodbye to 6-year-old Logan Tipton
The visitation for 6-year-old Logan Tipton was held at the Clark Funeral Home in Versailles Thursday from 2p.m.-8p.m.
Hundreds of people showed up to the funeral home to say goodbye to Logan Tipton. For a majority of the six hour long visitation, there was a line out the front door and onto the lawn of the funeral home. As guests walked up the sidewalk to the funeral home, they were greeted by a makeshift football field, because Logan loved playing the game of football.
“Logan was a very sweet little boy, always smiling and loved football. He was fierce out there on the field. He was little, but he was fierce and strong,” Lesha McKee said.
McKee’s 6-year-old son, Josiah was a teammate, classmate and friend of Logan Tipton.
“He is a strong boy on our team,” Josiah McKee said.
This is that makeshift football field at the funeral home
This morning, Versailles expects so many people to attend Logan’s funeral, that they moved it to the local football field. Another fitting gesture, since Logan played for the Woodford County youth football team.
We hope you are playing football in heaven🐝🏈RIP Logan Tipton pic.twitter.com/NxDOHVT0vr
— Woodford Co Football (@WoodfordFBall) December 7, 2015
Indeed, RIP Logan Tipton. If you’d like to help out his family, a fundraising page has been set up on his GoFundMe page.
Published in Policing
Have you seen a picture of Logan’s killer? It tells you all you need to know about the cowardice and complicity of the national media.
A black man brutally murders a 6-year old white boy in his sleep with a knife. Wrong color, wrong weapon. Reverse the image. Had Logan been named Da’Qell Tipton and been shot by a white man, MSNBC would be on fire. So would CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
And by pointing that fact out I am probably going to be labeled a racist. So be it. The truth is far uglier.
Thanks for writing about the story. Not enough attention is paid to victims of violent crime. Well, unless the crime can be politicized in some way. Then, it is still not about the victim. It is about someone or others agenda. Sad.
A terrible tragedy, but not sure what would make it a national story?
I will label you: courage. Don’t let the truth die of neglect. Well done EJ.
Following on EJ’s point. When a teenage criminal attacks a police officer, tries to kill him, and is subsequently shot by the officer in self defense it gets national wall-to-wall coverage and thrusts a domestic terrorist group to national notoriety.
This doesn’t appear to be a robbery or anything other than a cold blooded killer ending a life too soon.
Cameron has been in the lead about this little boy’s murder.
I hope everyone that reads this story scrolls down and read’s Kevin’s.
But that’s the point. Had those couple facts been changed, it would have been. The point here isn’t the facts of the case, but how the MSM only picks up on something when the “facts” fit their agenda.
And I placed “facts” in quotation marks because, well, you know.
Without further comment:
In addition to Kevin’s excellent advice, having some type of alarm system is also important. This family didn’t even know that there was anyone in the house until it was too late. Truly heartbreaking.
The “Narrative” as determined by the MSM is what gets promulgated. If something doesn’t fit the “Narrative” – it might get discussed, on a slow news day – but, and this is important, if it runs counter to the “Narrative” it will be actively suppressed.
Case in point.
His agent should be getting a call from NPR in 3,2,1….
This story is so upsetting that I could barely read it through. Just pure horror.
Probably the Indiana connection, but it made our Fort Wayne TV news, including a video showing the perpetrator in an orange jumpsuit and chains.
Give him the chair.
I guess since we are fairly close by the story has been covered here locally. So terrible. In cases like these I usually think you should tie the murderer to a chair in a room with the kids father and lock the door.
To add to BrentB67 and EJHill’s points, just reversing the race of the alleged perpetrator and the victim would greatly increase the media attention of this story.
Cameron brings this terrible story home with his fine writing and images – I could hardly bear to read to the end. I don’t know, but believe that the killer must have been deranged so I don’t reflexively see this as a racially based crime. But to Cameron’s point that so few are following the story, and to the contrasts illustrated by BrentB67 and EJHill, I also recoil at a media that so readily manipulates the strong feelings of these events with a false narrative of rampant racism that only seems to be at play in white-on-black crime.
Don’t ever post anything like this on Ricochet again. Not. Ever. Period.
Where is the mother flipping unlike button? I’m with you, Claire.
Why not?
I don’t really mean it. It’s just that I am a parent, and I just have no words how these stories make me feel. I can’t stomach it. I get angry. I want the guy who did this to suffer a long, excruciating life, maybe slowly digested over a thousand years. Or maybe life in prison with a group of large Analrapists. The death penalty is too good for the likes of this guy. Cruel and unusal will fit the bill nicely.
Understood and agreed.
I have a six year old right now, and it would have been devastating. My heart goes out to the child and the parents. May justice be done.
We have lethal injection here in KY, and while we aren’t Texas, we aren’t afraid to use it either.
Executed person
Date of execution
Method
Victims
Under Governor
The best way to deal with this is the way you are:
Call me a racist, I do not care. That word has no magic over me. When confronted with horror, I will not be silent.
I applaud your sentiment.
I’m having a terrible time wrapping my mind around this.
How the father had the restraint to simply “detain” this filthy, POS is beyond me. I am quite sure that my self control would have been non-existent. Duct tape and a pillowcase full of bricks might have been found to be useful. Father God, I pray for your peace and comfort to this family.
I am not sure I would want the Nationals involved. They would be leading the SJW charge to have the killer freed because of his racial background.
Three guys in 18 years? Amateurs.
That precious little boy is safe with his Savior right now, never to feel pain or fear again. That may not provide complete comfort for his bereaved parents but hopefully it will provide some.
I guess little Logan forgot to check his white privilege. There’s consequences for such disrespect. Don’t forget, it’s black lives that matter, six year old white boys don’t count.