Continue to Pray for Baton Rouge……….
The city of 229,493 is better known for its championship college football team and its political scene. But this broiling summer, it has been churning through tension and grief and taking a leading role in a national debate.
Sterling Pierce, a 32-year-old black appliance store worker, was shaken up Tuesday as he paid his respects outside the convenience store near where the officers were killed. A memorial at the site was growing as mourners streamed in to lay flowers and get hugs from a police chaplain. A sign read: “God … please help us heal!”
Shaking his head, Pierce struggled to make sense of recent events and to foresee an end to the violence. He showed bullet marks on his car and said the city’s problems run deep. The killing “is not going to stop down here,” he said. “It’s never going to change.”
Pierce said he was friends with Alton Sterling, the black man shot by white police officers two weeks ago. He also knew one of the officers killed this week, East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s Deputy Brad Garafola, a repeat customer at the store where Pierce works.
“This just messed me up,” he said. “I don’t know how to feel.”
This statement of “I don’t know how to feel”, is how most of us feel right now in Lafayette and through out the state and country…I pray for PEACE and HEALING for our communities and this country.