Certain phrases force a moment of quiet, unflinching reflection. Take the line printed in a recent obituary for a man killed by police gunfire: “Torn from our midst in a cruel and cowardly manner.” The words are steeped in raw, unmistakeable grief, but they also lay bare a series of uncomfortable, unaddressed questions about the full, unvarnished context that preceded that man’s death. No one can or should dispute a grieving family’s inherent right to mourn their lost loved one. But when the public knows the long, violent trail of harm the deceased left behind in his community, a jarring, unavoidable question arises: who is stepping forward to mourn the victims of his own cruelty?
Suriname is currently grappling with a spiraling national security crisis, where armed robberies, violent home invasions, and murder-for-theft incidents dominate local news cycles with growing frequency. Many residents say it increasingly feels as though the country has slipped into a lawless Wild West-style landscape, where criminal gangs act with escalating boldness and the under-resourced police force lacks the capacity to guarantee basic public safety for ordinary citizens.
Yet behind every news brief about a violent mugging or robbery lies a deeply personal, unreported human story. The victim could easily be an ordinary person simply running errands, commuting home after a long shift at work, or walking a family member to a nearby shop. These people do not only lose their material possessions in these attacks: many lose their physical health, their lifelong sense of personal safety, and in the worst cases, their lives.
Consider the 23-year-old young man shot and killed on a recent Saturday after muggers stole the gold chain from his neck. He had been walking to a local bakery to buy bread alongside his 12-year-old little sister, on what should have been a trivial, mundane family errand that spiraled into unthinkable tragedy. The young girl was exposed to unspeakable violence no child should ever witness, and a family was robbed of their son and brother. All that remains in the wake of the attack is overwhelming grief, disbelief, and the looming threat of trauma that could linger for decades.
But there is a second, far less often discussed side to this story.
As a newspaper editor, I was recently confronted with a profound professional ethical dilemma when a family submitted an obituary using that exact phrasing describing their deceased relative’s death as cruel and cowardly. I hesitated, not out of any desire to strip the grieving family of their right to mourn, but because I knew exactly who the man was, and the extensive harm he had inflicted on Surinamese society for years. He was a long-established, notorious member of a violent criminal gang, with a well-documented history of participating in brutal armed robberies and other serious felonies. For years, his group terrorized ordinary citizens without remorse, robbing victims, physically assaulting them, and issuing death threats to anyone who resisted. He was ultimately killed, alongside multiple other members of his gang, during a high-speed police chase and armed confrontation with law enforcement.
Reading an obituary that framed this career criminal’s death as a senseless, cowardly act of cruelty left me deeply conflicted. I fully understood the family’s overwhelming pain, but I could not separate their chosen framing from the long, well-documented history of violence that preceded his death. Where, I wondered, was the public recognition for all the people whose lives he had destroyed? For the families who lost their own loved ones to his acts, for the survivors who live on with permanent physical disabilities and lifelong psychological scars, for the people whose sense of safety was shattered forever by his crimes?
The bitter, uncomfortable irony is that the exact same cruelty the grieving family decries in their relative’s death is the very cruelty he inflicted on dozens of innocent people for years. The only difference is that his victims almost never receive the same level of public sympathy, media attention, or space for public mourning.
The grief of one family does not erase or diminish the grief of another. A mother does not have any less right to mourn her son just because he made devastating, harmful choices that hurt his community. But extending basic compassion to grieving relatives does not and should not mean erasing the reality of the harm he caused. We can fully respect a family’s right to grieve without excusing or whitewashing the violent crimes the deceased committed.
This reflection is not an attempt to justify excessive or unlawful police use of deadly force. All law enforcement officers are bound to operate strictly within the limits of the law, and every police shooting resulting in a death must undergo a full, transparent, independent investigation to confirm that the use of force was both legal and absolutely necessary. No person, including police officers, is above the rule of law. But by the same token, the severity of a suspect’s proven criminal actions should not be erased or ignored simply because that suspect has died during an encounter with authorities.
As a society, we urgently need to adopt a far more critical, intentional approach to how we talk about both perpetrators of violence and their innocent victims. Why does public grief for a deceased, known violent offender so often receive more prominent space in public discourse than the enduring suffering of the people he harmed? Why have so many of us grown desensitized to routine news reports of ordinary people losing their lives to random acts of street violence?
This ongoing security crisis cannot be solved by simply increasing police staffing, adding more roadside checkpoints, or imposing harsher criminal sentences. It ultimately forces all of us to confront a deeper, more fundamental question about what kind of society we want to build and sustain. A community where ordinary people now routinely plan their daily routines around the risk that a quick trip to the grocery store, a drive home from work, or a casual walk down the street could end in their death is a society that is rapidly losing its foundational sense of collective safety.
Even more dangerous than the rising rate of violent crime, however, is the slow, insidious process of normalizing that violence. We cannot afford to grow numb to news reports of armed robberies, shootouts, and robbery-related murders. We cannot afford to shrug our shoulders and dismiss yet another fatal shooting as just another routine news story, or treat the destruction of yet another grieving family as an unremarkable, unavoidable part of daily life. Behind every single victim of violence is a unique human story that deserves to be centered and honored. Behind every violent incident is lasting pain that does not simply fade away when the news cycle moves on.
Mourning deserves full respect in our community. But justice, accountability, and collective remembrance for all victims also deserve a central, permanent place in our shared social consciousness. Because when we speak of someone being “torn from our midst in a cruel and cowardly manner,” we must also have the courage to pause and honor all the innocent people that very same man tore from their own loved ones, and ask the critical, long-overdue question: who is going to mourn for them?
Column: Wie rouwt om de slachtoffers van de wreedheid?
