Remember: A killing is tragedy enough

A man with a gun sees a suspicious character. Shouts follow. Shots are fired. A teenager lies dead on the street, and his family criticizes authorities as too easy on his killer. Sound familiar?

The attorney for Donald Rattanavong, 58, of Elgin, urged people watching the trial of his client this week not to make connections with the polarizing case out of Sanford, Fla., of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. Lewis Gainer stressed that, unlike the Zimmerman case, his client was watching as four men appeared to be breaking into his car, and he was acting “on his own property defending himself from people who were engaged in criminal activity.”

Yet, even as Rattanavong now stands acquitted of manslaughter but convicted of reckless discharge of a firearm, some of the parallels are hard to ignore. A citizen’s rush to judgment. A difference of cultures — Rattanavong is Asian, his victim, Guillermo Pineda, Hispanic (though, notably, race never emerged as an issue). The teenage victim. Gunfire. The self-defense defense. Relatives concerned that legal authorities didn’t take the case seriously enough.

And, in the wake of the Rattanavong verdict, one glaring contrast stands out. That is that the courts were allowed to do their job and to earnestly strive for whatever can be called justice in such a tragedy.

Last July, police investigated and arrested Rattanavong. Prosecutors studied his case and announced charges. Pineda’s family protested what they saw as leniency, and their protests were acknowledged and chronicled in prominent newspaper stories. They were repeated again this week as Rattanavong’s trial got under way.

It is not a “clean” case. It has its complications and its controversies, as cases often do. But it has managed to rattle its way through the justice system under the watchful eye of the media and the public. How, one wonders, will the same ever be said of the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case?

Leapt on practically from the outset by ratings- and controversy-thirsty broadcasters often eager to drape the case in political overtones — both from the right and the left — then embraced by the usual spotlight-hungry activists — again from both the right and the left — this case is being forced not to rattle awkwardly toward some hoped-for justice but to limp, dodge and tumble toward a conclusion that has come to mean so much more — and ultimately, perhaps, much less — than the tragic confrontation that ended in the death of an American teenager.

Media attention and public scrutiny play an important role in helping assure that something like justice results from court cases, and the Rattanavong/Pineda trial demonstrates how a case can reach a conclusion, even if controversial, that deserves respect.

Perhaps that happens because the temptation has been avoided to assume that the case was not tragic enough in its own right. It was indeed.

May all the people involved in the Zimmerman/Martin case be fortunate enough to learn the same.