White Florida Man Says He Would Have Shot Black Girl Who Rang His Doorbell
Recently, a white man in Tampa, Florida, found out the hard way that publicly threatening to shoot a 9-year-old Black girl just for ringing your doorbell isn’t the kind of thing that will be well-received. Now, he’s pleading for the public to understand his mindset at the time, because, for whatever reason, he believes worrying over his own child justifies threatening deadly harm against someone else’s.
Meet Tyler Chambers.
Last week, Chambers got himself dragged up and down social media after voluntarily posting to his neighborhood’s Facebook group a screenshot taken from the doorbell camera on his home that showed the Black child in question at his door in broad daylight. He captioned the post, “You’re lucky we weren’t home to shoot your a— dumb b—.”
Again, you have to wonder what Tyler Chambers was expecting in response to this. After all, before he took the screenshot, wrote his Klan-ish caption and hit “send,” he knew he was posting a photo of a small child, and that, with no further context, it just looked like he was fantasizing about murdering Black children for no reason other than they exist. I mean, I know it’s Florida we’re talking about here — a state where Black history is policed far more than white supremacy is — but, still.
If Chambers didn’t realize immediately how wrong he was, he certainly figured it out once the backlash began, prompting him to delete the post before deactivating his account entirely. Eventually, he went back online to offer an explanation that, among other things, suggested he was lying about he and his family not being home.
“I saw that on my camera and have a wife and 7-month-old at home, which I will protect as you would. I was hot when I posted it which is why I deleted it right away I could have handled it a lot different,” Chambers wrote, adding he wants to locate the girl’s parents to apologize.
The girl’s mother, identified on social media as Beyond Shabazz, was apparently not too impressed by an explanation that really didn’t explain anything. (Because people have new babies at home every day, B. Most of those people aren’t threatening to shoot anyone who rings their doorbell, especially a prepubescent child.)
“This could have been anybody’s child, and our job as parents is to protect our kids. My child does not feel safe in her neighborhood now due to this, and now every time she clicks on her Facebook or TikTok, she sees what this monster posted about her for the world to see,” Shabazz wrote. “I will not let this go under the rug. I promise I will make an example out of this fool.”
Shabazz wrote that she filed a police report against Tyler Chambers after catching wind of his post, and that she was informed by officers that he had been doxxed, causing him and his family to flee their home after his home address and place of business had been exposed to the public.
Now, there are certainly folks out there who are going to say people online went too far, and that Chambers’ family shouldn’t have to suffer over his violent foolishness. And, sure, maybe it’s arguable that those people have a point. However, that was far from my first thought when I first read Chambers’ post and heard about the fallout from it.
My first thought was about Ralph Yarl.
Just over two years ago, Ralph, who was 16 at the time, was shot in Kansas City, Missouri, after ringing the doorbell at the wrong house while attempting to pick his younger sibling up from their friend’s home. The white man who shot him, not once, but twice, Andrew Lester, admitted to officers that he was awakened by the teen knocking on his door, a clear indicator that the teen had no intention of committing a home invasion. But that didn’t stop the 84-year-old from shooting the teen in the head without warning then shooting him again in the arm as he ran away while shouting at Ralph, “Don’t come around here!” Thankfully, Ralph survived the shooting.
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