Dear William Zanzinger,

You committed a horrible rime that did not only affect a family but everyone around the country. You took innocent people’s lives away because of a drunken night and not realizing what came out of your mouth. Have you ever tried to put yourself in their shoes? People like you should not deserve to live.

Your race, gender, and power made your crime seem like an innocent mistake. So what if your white and own a farm? That doesn’t mean you are any less of a human.

Hattie Carroll, an educated woman, who was only trying to make a living for her and her eleven children, she did not deserve something like this. The death of Hattie Carroll was very brutal. The things you said to her shouldn’t have even been said. Her eleven children are left without the love of a mother. Who will raise them? How did they take the pain of loosing a mother?

I hope your conscience is haunting you day and night and all you can think about is the murder. You should be taking this matter upon your own hands and trying to make the best lives for her children.

The punishment that you received was not reasonable at all. You should have been in jail for live and sentenced to death.

Everyday there are people like you who try to slide away from their crime because of their money and power. There are people like you who make matters worse by being racist to other people. Racist will never go away but as individuals we can always try to make matters better by taking it upon us. It doesn’t matter if your parents were racist, if matters how you act around people who are different from you. We do not want people of our country to keep being racist, we want a change!

In my English class we recently discussed how racism affects our lives daily, whether it is for applying for a new position at work or being in the same room with different races. Racism doesn’t occur only in trying to get ahead in life, but also with violence. Violence is the key factor in which people get killed everyday and loosing families.

Mr. Zanzinger, if I were in your position at this moment, I would go back to court and tell the judge what really happened and that a crime is a crime. You should get the appropriate punishment. Just remember, we need to try to eliminate racism as much as we can from our lives.

From,

Alyssa