Monday's State News read, "One man is dead and another wounded after an early morning shooting at an East Lansing 7-Eleven store."
It's a sentence any MSU student hopes never to read and a sentence no reporter for The State News ever wished to write. Sadly, it was the most important sentence in yesterday's paper and most likely the most important of the coming week.
It's a great tragedy that a death so reckless, violent and needless should touch a student community - or any community - so closely.
For as cliché as "hitting close to home" sounds and is, this time it really happened. And what perked students' ears and eyes to the maze of yellow caution tape surrounding a body bag in the 7-Eleven parking lot on Sunday morning was that we all knew how close we were to tragedy.
Remember that sentence, the important one from Monday's paper. "East Lansing," "early morning," "7-Eleven store." How many 7-Elevens have we been to in the wee hours of a Saturday or Sunday morning? We all knew how close anyone in the community was to being caught in that crossfire.
But now one man is dead and another injured, and East Lansing again feels the brunt of losing its idyllic innocence as a college town.
Violence flares up every once in a while in this town, and that's an unfortunate inevitability. People get shot in this town, strong-arm robberies threatened this city last fall, and women are attacked more than most would care to believe.
And each time that happens, when we read saddening and shocking sentences in the newspaper and write them with the same regret, we make sure the doors are locked before going to bed that night. Then the next night, and maybe the night after. But soon enough, East Lansing bounces back.
This is the first time there's been a shooting death in East Lansing in more than four years. None of the involved parties - victims or suspects - were East Lansing residents.
They knew one another, and there was nothing random about Sunday's violence. The only connection that MSU has to Sunday's shooting at 7-Eleven is that campus is visible from where it took place, and students had to be the eyewitnesses.
Every community faces such indiscriminate violence from time to time, and each time it happens, most communities show how resilient they really are. The idyllic college town we all call home is only the backdrop to this crime - an innocent bystander to senseless violence, which is why we should act accordingly.
Don't forget what happened on Sunday morning at 7-Eleven, but don't let it dictate the day-to-day, either. Exercise caution, but no more than any sensible person does to reflect the current crime climate and situations.
If you're walking alone in a dark East Lansing alley, don't expect to be assaulted. No one should be forced to live life like that. Random violence is tragic, yes, but it should be learned from, too. We needn't change our lives and our community based on a poorly made snap judgment from a visitor.
One man is dead, and another is injured. But who took in the injured man as he fled, and who called police when the bullets flew? 'U' did. Now that's the most important sentence to remember a week from now.
