look. i wasn't kidding about needing the positive news

My co-worker who covers Hyattsville and surrounding areas nearly threw a fit at her desk this afternoon after I forwarded her an NBC4.com e-mail alert informing me a Parkdale HS student was jumped and stabbed while walking home from school. In the middle of the damn day, no less. She had a right to literally throw her headphones off in anger. It's getting to the point where whenever we hear something on the local news about someone getting stabbed/shot/drowned etc., we don't even cross our fingers anymore hoping it isn't someone in our coverage areas. We KNOW it's someone in our coverage area. The only other place I can think of where people are getting just as hurt are the 48937584 people that have recently been smacked around by hit and run drivers in south county.

Somewhere in the process of information gathering--before learning the stabbing was unfortunately a fatal one--WJLA posted an obligatory web alert, using this as the graphic:



^Personally I thought this was a bit much

However, what I said above does bear repeating: It's almost always my coverage area and my co-worker's. This kind of thing, though tragic, is not happening throughout the ENTIRE county. And response to this story will get real annoying real fast because I know every message board (which is consistently full of people who don't even know to include an apostrophe when spelling "Prince George's County") will feel the need to post a response to these web alerts, something to the effect of "Just another day in PG county." I still don't know why people in this area act like this stuff happens in every single corner of county. If they paid attention, they'd realize it's only happening on the inside of the Capital Beltway. If it takes me almost an hour to get from one end of the county to another and end up in farmland then what could you be possibly basing your generalizations on? If it's only the news, and you actually have not driven through parts of the county that weren't skirting Montgomery County I question your credibility.

I'd say make any of those posters watch a 11 p.m. WBAL Newscast and they'll think Prince George's County is the black man's utopia.