Jovan Belcher does not deserve your sympathy

Kasandra Perkins and her 3-month-old baby Zoe, who now has lost both parents, deserve our sympathy. Javon Belchar does not (Image credit: Tumblr.com).

Scott Pioli deserves to be fired for his team’s performance on the field this season. But on Saturday, there was no one more qualified to be the Chiefs GM off the field.

Romeo Crennel’s first season as Chiefs head coach has been nothing short of a disaster. But over the weekend, Crennel showed what kind of an incredible man and leader he is in beginning to lead his team, and a city, back from a disastrous tragedy.

Pioli and Crennel deserve to be called heroes for how they handled the few minutes they had with Jovan Belcher in the Arrowhead Stadium parking lot Saturday. No matter how dangerous, or not dangerous, they believed Belchar was, they kept an armed man who had already killed the mother of his child that morning from hurting anyone else…except himself.

I am not a Chiefs fan, but I was this weekend. I think Piloi and Crennel deserve to be let go for their on-the-job performance this season. But I am so glad they were still employed by the Chiefs Saturday morning. I am incredibly proud of the way Kansas City, my city, came together to handle such a senseless tragedy. And yet, I feel the need to make sure one piece of this story that kept coming up over the weekend is addressed.

Jovan Belcher does not deserve your sympathy. He is a murderer. And a coward. Kasandra Perkins deserves your sympathy. Their 3-month-old daughter Zoe deserves your sympathy. The Perkins and Belchar families deserve your sympathy.

But not Jovan Belcher. He shot the mother of his young daughter nine times while his mother and the child were in the house. He put everyone else in the house, where he gunned Kasandra down, and at Arrowhead when he sped into the parking lot, at risk. He killed himself, leaving his daughter without either of her parents and forcing the GM and coach he felt were worth thanking to live with what they saw for the rest of their lives.

Brady Quinn played and handled himself extremely well Sunday. After the game, he made a comment that hit home for a lot of people:

“When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth? We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us. Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.”

Strong words that make me think I need to spend less time on my computer and phone and more time with my family. But at the same time, Quinn also said this to Peter King Sunday when answering a question about completing 14 passes in a row against the Panthers:

“I don’t know what happened,” said Quinn, a very religious man. “I’d like to think maybe I had some help, somewhere, from No. 59 [Belchar]. But no, I can’t explain it.”

A man who did what Belcher did to his family Saturday morning does not deserve to be talked about in that sympathetic way. Then there was Chiefs owners Clark Hunt, who said this when asked “Why did the Chiefs management deem it inappropriate to wear Belcher’s number on the players’ jerseys?”