Hey ignorant-you off to a Klan meeting now?You are completely disgusting and a racist.

HE’LL HAVE TO ANSWER TO HIS MAKER FOR THAT *****

Child’s love answered with a knife

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Jarvis DeBerry

I’ve often wondered what my father would have done if, like Abraham, he’d been asked to sacrifice his one and only son. According to Genesis, the Jewish patriarch was willing to kill his boy Isaac out of obedience to God, but God, being satisfied with the father’s willingness, called out to stop Abraham before he could plunge his knife.

I’ve imagined Melvin DeBerry pulling a Jacob and wrestling all night with God before even considering raising his hand against me. It doesn’t matter to me that he’s a deacon at his church. As his son, I’ve imagined him defiantly disobeying a divine order to kill me and me loving him all the more for that disobedience.

I know the arms-spread-wide love a boy has for his daddy, and because my father is who he is, I know the piggy-back kind of love a daddy has for his son. And then I read that Danny Platt claims he had “a whole bunch of reasons” for slitting the throat of his 2-year-old son Ja’Shawn Powell and allowing the toddler to bleed to death.
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“I’m sorry about killing my baby,” Platt reportedly said on his way to jail Saturday night where he was booked with first-degree murder. “I had a lot of pressure on me.” Then, he made his preposterous claim that his reasons for killing his child were numerous.

But apparently Platt’s reasons did not include the $4,000 in child support he owed the boy’s mother, Daniella Powell. “No, sir,” Platt answered when he was asked Saturday night if he killed the boy to avoid paying child support.

She was entitled to it, of course, but Powell says she wasn’t deliberately seeking it from her child’s father. She had applied for food stamps and for Medicaid for Ja’Shawn, and when she listed the father’s information, the state government rightfully sought payment from him. The state was deducting about $100 from each of Platt’s weekly paychecks. But we have Platt’s word that the forced deduction was not what Ja’Shawn’s murder was about.

Even if it wasn’t about paying back child support in particular, it’s clear that he was trying to get back at the baby’s mother in general. There is nothing Ja’Shawn could have done to his father to make Platt kill him.

In fact, to hear Ja’Shawn’s mother tell it, the boy adored his mostly absent daddy and, despite Platt’s infrequent visits, considered the man his protector and his enforcer. “I’m going to tell my daddy on you,” was Ja’Shawn’s threat to cousins who had crossed him. Such a threat indicates the faith Ja’Shawn had in Platt, a faith betrayed when his father knifed him to death.

I used to believe that I loved my father because he loved me. I used to think that I loved him not because he carried me around on his shoulders or let me sit on his lap to watch basketball games or showed me how to keep my center of gravity low to catch a hard-hit ground ball, but because he was there — day in, day out, no matter the cir*****stances. But Ja’Shawn’s gleeful reaction Friday night makes plain that a little boy will love a daddy who has done next to nothing for him.

Daniella Powell says Ja’Shawn said, “Oh, my daddy’s here” and ran to the door saying, “Daddy, daddy, daddy.”

“He was so happy,” she said.

And then the father raised his hand against him.

Because I am essentially an Isaac, the story of Abraham taking his son up a mountain to kill him has always made me shudder. But I understand that the thing that makes me uncomfortable is the same thing that gives the story such power. Killing his son (or his daughter, for that matter) is something a father just does not do.

Yet, Platt said, “I had a whole bunch of reasons.”

Every one of them undoubtedly evil.