A Woman Spoke Ill of a Dead Teen. Her Principal Wouldn't Have It

Now this is a principal. On Sunday 18-year-old Myneishia Johnson was gunned down on the streets of downtown Memphis when a 19-year-old allegedly fired a rifle into a crowd. Two days later, a woman emailed Booker T. Washington Principal Alisha Coleman-Kiner questioning her decision to allow the dead teen's 1-year-old son to walk across the stage with his grandmother at graduation and accept his mother's diploma, reports the Memphis Commercial Appeal. "What are you thinking?" the woman wrote. "You’re acknowledging and celebrating this young child whose mother was tragically killed when in all fairness probably should have been home taking care of that young infant who now has no mother and quite frankly don’t know who the father is." Coleman-Kiner replied with an open Facebook letter "to the lady who judged my baby...." that had one commenter declaring, "Did anybody get the number off of that MACK TRUCK!"

Coleman-Kiner called the woman out for poor grammar, stereotyping those involved, and generally being ignorant about the situation. "Who told you that no one knew who the father is?" she wrote. "Where were you when he couldn’t stand under the grief on Sunday at the candlelight vigil?" Coleman-Kiner says Johnson had her hands full caring for her own baby while working a job, never missing a day of her honor's classes, helping with her siblings, and playing sports. She concludes, "Because SEVEN is the number of completion, and symbolically the number of days my student had left to walk across the stage when her life was AGGRESSIVELY snatched away from her, my last point is: Stay. In. Your. Lane." Coleman-Kiner tells WMCActionNews5 that Johnson "was much too important for the conversation to end when we bury her." (Another principal died while shoving kids to safety.)