Say His Name By Christine Steele

Say his name. His name was Elijah Hadley. He was 17 years old. He was someone’s son, grandson, brother, nephew, friend. And he was shot 19 times by an Otero County Sheriff’s Deputy while walking alone on the side of the road.

At Tuesday night’s Alamogordo City Commission Meeting, Mayor Susan Payne refused to say his name. Instead, she called him “the elephant in the room.” His name is Elijah Hadley. Instead, Mayor Payne invoked the names of several law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty, none of them recently.

Here’s the thing: Members of law enforcement sign up for a job in which they know they are going to put their life on the line everyday. Just like military veterans and firefighters. When you join those organizations, you know you are signing up for a job that puts you in harm’s way and you willingly accept that.

Elijah Hadley signed up for no such job.

The thing about compassion is that it is not a zero sum game. Having compassion takes nothing away from the world and actually adds something to it. You can “back the blue” and still have compassion for a tragic loss of life. In fact, compassion is a central tenet to Catholicism and Christianity, and the understanding of God. We can have compassion for others even when we disagree with them.

Mayor Susan Payne has a platform. She uses it freely — so freely in fact that rarely do other Alamogordo Commissioners get to speak. She could use that platform for good. She could have said that there was a tragic loss of life in the death of Elijah Hadley. Even if she believed the shooting was justified, she could have shown compassion for the family who lost a child. You can bet if that child was her son or grandson, she would be singing a different tune, asking for an in-depth investigation and a thorough review of what happened. Instead, she refused to say his name.

Say his name.

His name was Elijah Hadley.

NOTE: This article was contributed by Christine Steele. Christine Steele is an award-winning journalist and editor with 16 years of experience writing for newspapers from Maine to Arizona. She has won awards for Investigative Reporting, Editorials, News Reporting, Best Serious Column Writing, Deadline Writing, and Features. For the past six years, she has been a freelance marketing writer and teaches writing online at Western New Mexico University. She is also the founder of a cold case nonprofit, Southern New Mexico Unsolved Murders.

Linkedin.com/in/christinelste

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