A ‘Period Dignity Officer’ Seemed Like a Good Idea. Until a Man Was Named.
HOLBROOK, Ill. — As they drove up a small lane in a residential neighborhood of Belleville, Ill., John C. Wright’s parents pulled to the side of the road to let him out.
They did so not because of the warm weather, which had begun a few weeks earlier, but because of the death.
A few days earlier, in another part of the country, a man named Craig Wright took out a gun and put it to the head of his wife, who was four months pregnant, then took her lifeless body from the car, wrapped her in a blanket and left her on a roadway. The couple lived in a house near the road.
Craig Wright was shot in the head by the responding police officer and died less than a minute later.
To a reporter, a few miles away, Wright’s parents’ behavior was like the story of another father: A young man named Timothy C. Knight, the youngest son of a man who’d won the Nobel Peace Prize. As Knight walked home from school, carrying his lunch and a backpack, he was shot dead by two men he had just met.
“The police were called about him and he was shot dead after running away,” said Susan Knight, mother of Tim Knight, as she described her son in the interview from her home in Brooklyn.
After the death of Tim Knight, who lived in Brooklyn, the police were called in to investigate. It was not Wright. When a reporter asked Knight when she had learned of her son’s death, she said she had learned when she saw the report in the newspaper. She described the police in a few words: “They were rude and rude and rude.”
But she was unable to provide the police, or the press, with the name of the officer, and she only knew the name Craig Wright.