THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 7, 1997 TAG: 9702070007
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: 23 lines
I live in the Landstown Meadows subdivision of Virginia Beach, where 17-year-old Timothy Wheaton was killed Jan. 25. While I appreciated the media's extensive coverage of the story, I am a little disappointed that the dozens of other teen-agers in Hampton Roads who are killed violently each year do not get the same press attention.
I often see small stories, barely a few paragraphs long, about a teenager in Portsmouth or Norfolk who was gunned down. Who are these kids? Were they soccer players too? What kind of friends did they have? Why didn't that get ``Team Coverage'' on channel whatever?
The shock of this story, of course, is that it happened in a ``nice'' neighborhood to a ``good'' boy. Perhaps there would be less racial tension in this country if the media appeared to value the story of a black teen-ager dying in the projects as it does the white teen in the suburbs.
JOANNA CULBERTSON
Virginia Beach, Jan. 28, 1997