When is enough really enough? People scream Black Lives Matter, yet no one is listening. It is tragic to see two Black women, 23-year old Lauren Smith-Fields and 53-year old Brenda Lee Rawls die on the same night with no legitimate effort in solving their deaths. As far as we know, two investigators involved in both cases were put on administrative leave.

When Lauren’s body was found in her apartment, the investigators gathered her passport and ID to take to the medical examiner’s office for an autopsy without the family’s knowledge of it. In the autopsy, the cause of her death was “the combined effects of fentanyl, promethazine, hydroxyzine, and alcohol and ruled her death an accident.” Lauren’s family didn’t discover her death until the day after she died. Detectives and officers at the Bridgeport Police Department failed to communicate with the Smith-Fields about the incident, mentioning that the suspect was just a “nice guy” when he was the last person to see her prior to her death.

In Brenda’s case, Brenda had gone to visit an acquaintance on December 11. The Rawls family had not heard from her for three days. So on December 14,  they began searching for Brenda at her acquaintance’s house. Once they got to the house, “[the acquaintance] allegedly said that he couldn’t wake her up on December 12 and that she had died” – no one ever notified the family about Brenda’s death either.

Law enforcement has a history of poor scrutiny when it comes to Black people’s suffering. We’ve seen it during the BLM movement in 2020, we’ve seen it in Breonna’s Taylor’s death, we’ve seen it in the Trayvon Martin case, and the list goes on. Some people in society already view Black people as inferior. The lack of recognition for missing or dead Black girls raises the inferiority and places non-POC on a pedestal whenever they suffer from a tragedy. There were “268,884 girls and women reported missing in the United States [in 2020] according to the National Crime Information Center. A third of those reported missing were Black.” Whether dead or missing, those young Black girls deserve justice just as Gabby Petito did in her investigation. The immediate call to action on investigating Gabby Petito’s death portrays America’s perspective towards a group of women they consider to be more dignified. It is difficult to receive justice in a system that reduces Black people into a tiny speck.

We need to begin creating solutions on how we can raise more awareness about saving young Black girls and women: protesting, informative discussions, petitions, and so on. Even though we celebrate Black people’s achievements and contributions during Black History Month, we must also acknowledge the loss of those who have suffered in neglect and demise.