The Fruitvale Station Shooting

by Fergus Mason

New Years. Oscar Grant was celebrating like most of the world. On his way home from a celebration at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, everything changed. Oscar Grant, an unarmed man, was shot dead by BART police. A crowd of onlookers caught it all on cell phones. The shooting shook he community to its core. Protest and riots soon followed and it became Oakland’s equivalent of Rodney King. This book will look into what exactly happened and what happened to those who were involved.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

122 pages, Paperback

First published May 9, 2013

Reviews

[Russ Dent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy to read but a very good insight in to what happened that night, I saw the film by mistake which is what lead me to read this book, another sad tale of wasted life

[Lora Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not really a fan of telling the climax/heart of the story in the prologue or first chapter, and then the next chapter starts the life story of the protagonist. If you're going to tell the life story of the 2 MC's, I'd rather you start with that. I also take issue with the fact that there was an entire chapter dedicated just to talking about the type of gun and the type of taser that the officers carried. An entire chapter is/was not necessary.

I think that the the author did a fairly good job in giving a lot of pertinent details, showing that he did a good amount of research. I think he wanted to also come off as impartial one way or the other, but wasn't completely successful based on the statement "...it's no use pretending he was an innocent victim in all of this..." Actually, he was. Oscar Grant had had some trouble with the law when he was younger and had even had a previous gun charge. But even the author himself acknowledged that he seemed to be trying to turn his life around. That's aside from the fact that he did not have a weapon at the time of the shooting, was not aggressive in any way, and did not resist at all. This was proven by multiple witness statements and multiple videos taken at the time. So, when it comes to this incident, he WAS an innocent victim; victim blaming has no place here whatsoever.

This book was published in 2013, the same year the movie about this case came out. At the time of the movie release, I wasn't interested in seeing the movie because I knew that it would show a clear cut case of murder and would only make me angry and sad. But since I decided to expand my reading interests beyond romance and serial killers, I've been adding all kinds of things to my library. (I'm still wavering on whether or not to see the movie.) Bottom line: this isn't exactly exceptionally written. You could read 2-3 articles on the case and pretty much get the exact same information, and probably more.

[Lisa Conti-Ripley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read but packed with a lot of information.