ORLANDO
When I think of graduation time, I don’t think about my own crossing the stage in cap and gown drag. Nor do I think of my kids.
I think about my cousin Stephen, who I saw as the second coming of my father. Stephen came to the U.S. an immigrant when he was 8 years old from the Philippines. He practically traced my father’s footsteps and then exceeded them. He received his B. A. in International Relations from San Francisco State University in 2014.
But there is a digression. The degree came a few weeks after his violent gun death.
It was a posthumous degree, but it didn’t have to be.
He was celebrating his impending graduation and was drunk one night. He went back to the tenement apartment on Mission Street in San Francisco, where he had lived for 18 years in one room with his family. He took the elevator to his apartment on the 5th floor. But got off on the 3rd. When you’re drunk it all looks the same. But it was the wrong floor, and the wrong apartment. And while there was no sign of a struggle or breaking or entering, he was inside an apartment that was not his.
The resident, a retired security guard, had a gun. And he knew the law. The Castle Doctrine says if an intruder comes into your home you can shoot to kill. No questions asked. It’s self-defense.
