Miss Von Schtoop was in Roxbury District Court today, and wishes the newspapers weren't so clinical sometimes:

... I mean a thirteen year old boy was shot five times, five minutes from home. He was thirteen. He wasn't in a gang. He was a pre-teen living in a tough neighborhood but that does not mean his painful, solitary death should be shrugged off.

A thirteen year old boy, perched between the naivety of childhood and the sudden, surprising hardness of his teenage years, that's all. He was shot to death - hot, hard bullets shredding through the soft and pliant tissues of his liver, his kidney, his heart. A little kid really. Torn up by bullets on a cold winter night. Left to die by himself, without the comfort of his family, bewildered and terrified and dying. ...