On October 8, at least one ICE officer fired seven rounds into Oscar Belgal’s car in Marble Hill, hitting him in the neck with a 5-year-old inside. The New York Post headlined his record and a verdict credited to “neighbors.” The headline has a shooting and no shooter. ICE appears only after “shot by”, as the doer of a passive verb. Every active verb belongs to the man, who “has” a rap sheet and “is” not a New Yorker. A reader arrives asking why an officer fired. The headline answers who the man was before. The story keeps that order. It reaches the agent, the neck wound and the 5-year-old in the backseat in its 22nd paragraph, after 21 on his record, gang allegations and sanctuary laws. It never names who fired. The words belong to the Department of Homeland Security. Its October 8 statement, which did not name him, called him “a criminal illegal alien” and listed a grand larceny conviction and arrests. For the gunfire it offered one clause: an officer “discharged his weapon”. Secretary Markwayne Mullin added “thug” and “possible murderer”, the slide from a status to a threat. The tell: when a headline about a person who was hurt lists that person’s past, look for the person who hurt him. Here he is not in the sentence. The same eyes go to the other side. MS NOW makes the agent the subject and writes “father” where the Post writes “migrant”. THE CITY and Wired answer with a record too: an ICE supervisor “at Center of NYC Shooting”, named in lawsuits. No headline here says he fired, so his past explains the shot no better than Belgal’s does. The accounts of the act still differ. The police commissioner describes a plainclothes officer coming at a parking car with a gun drawn, then shots when it pulled forward. Mullin describes fleeing and ramming.
