Newark mayor Cory Booker has a very active imagination. Eliana Johnson demonstrated that with her report on Booker's moving, highly detailed accounts of his involvement with "T-Bone," a hard-luck drug dealer who Booker admitted to a friend is a fiction.
So count us as a little skeptical about heart-wrenching stories told by Cory Booker that happen to serve his rhetorical purposes. That is why Eliana has gotten interested in the case of Wazn Miller. In the sort of tragedy all too common in our cities, Miller was gunned down in Newark in 2004 in a murder that has never been solved.
Almost no one would have heard his name if Booker hadn't repeatedly told the story of his last minutes. According to Booker, he heard shots in his neighborhood, Miller stumbled backwards and collapsed into his arms, and then died, as Booker whispered into his ear, "Stay with me, stay with me."
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