Amid Frenzy over The King of Pop, don't forget the "Queens" who died in a mangled subway car

Outside UCLA Medical Center, and the Jackson Family state in Encino, there thousands of people gather. Some truly moved and paying their respects, some wanting to be part of a happening (this is wacky California after all). They mourn with an intensity not seen since Elvis departed this Earth for peanut butter-bacon-Qaalude sandwich heaven, and Mark David Chapman gunned down John Lennon.
I get it. But there's no frenzy, tears, sighs or 24 hours coverage for the working moms torn to pieces, smashed and broken in the Metro crash outside of Ft. Totten station, D.C. "Blanket" Jackson will inherit millions. What of the kids of these women...working moms. Single working black and Hispanic moms breaking their backs? What's being devised or legated to them other than sorrow and financial ruin? And Metro, existing on a pittance because the governments of DC, Maryland and Virgina want to keep it a feudal vassal (and GOP Administrations who see mass transit as a little too populist), is at a loss as to how to keep this from happening again. Some of our suburban jerks even sneered that the dead train operator, Jeanice McMillan, was likely yapping on her mobile phone and not paying attention. Jeanice's phone was found in her crushed backpack, turned off. And her family has to endure that dig. The kids of another mom, Ana Fernandez, are apparently receiving anonymous harassing calls about their dead mother's immigration status.
Let's lay some digital flowers, then, on some graves--not just these women, but the men who died, too. Real Dads. Real couples, like the Whereleys. No not single black moms struggling to feed their kids. Just as tragic. General David Wherley and his wife Ann were on their way back from Walter Reed, where they visited DC National Guardsmen--90% of them African American, wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's no 90 minute Today Show coverage for the Wherleys or the people they were visiting. Meredith Viera--who was once a real journalist--isn't here to prattle on about how she danced to "ABC" in her bedroom as a little girl.
Nope.
In a subsequent post I'll show you photos and bios, memorial funds. Real people. Real problems. No face-altering plastic surgery. But let's start.



This is Veronica DeBose, single mom of two little kids. Going to night school to become a nursing assistant. Once she got her certification, she was going to move to North Carolina, buy a little house, re-start her life.