The Murder of Cannon Hinnant:
Contemporary Crime and the Black Lives Matter Movement
Cannon Hinnant. Photo image courtesy of Twitter.
“Our culture is unique from other communities because we are the only community that caters to the bottom denominator of our society…” -Candace Owens speaking on Twitter about the murder of George Floyd on June 3rd, 2020.
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Two weeks ago, in Public Health Policy Reviews number 49, we wrote about the intersection of urban crime, public safety, and public health.
Our subject focus was far-right-wing political documentary filmmaker Lauren Southern and her December 2020 film Crossfire. Crossfire was promoted as an independent documentary film about policing in America, police brutality, and the rise of the radical and far-left-wing Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Anti-Fascist (ANTIFA) movements in the United States.
What Crossfire turned out to be was a remake and reintroduction of the historical phenomenon of White-racist propaganda films like “The Birth of a Nation.” The Birth of a Nation was a 1915 silent film ode to the Ku Klux Klan, a White supremacist and domestic terrorist organization formed in 1865. Confederate Civil War veterans created the “KKK” in Tennessee during the Reconstruction era in the South after the war.
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic magnified underlying economic conditions currently exacerbating the racial strife and mental illness running rampant across the US.
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Cannon Hinnant (left). Darius Sessoms’ mugshot (right).
The social stratification of the COVID-19 era somehow mirrors the social divisions of the post-Reconstruction era US South.
The modern iteration of the KKK could not have dreamed up a better excuse to justify their racist hate and violent marauding through African American neighborhoods than the senseless murder of Cannon Hinnant. Cannon Hinnant was a 5-year-old boy from Wilson, North Carolina.
A mentally ill petty criminal named Darius Sessoms brutally executed Cannon Hinnant in August 2020. According to witnesses, Darius Sessoms walked up to Cannon Hinnant unprovoked and shot him in the head while the child was riding his bike in his front yard.
Many people believe Sessoms killed Cannon Hinnant because he was White. Darius Sessoms is a Black man. Cannon Hinnant died in front of his seven-year-old and eight-year-old sisters and multiple neighbors.
Doris Lybrand, a neighbor to both Mr. Sessoms and Hinnant’s family, told WRAL-TV news she saw Sessoms walk up to Cannon Hinnant and put a gun near his head before firing. Sessoms then ran home.
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Image by Steve Woods on Unsplash.
“My first reaction was he’s playing with the kids,” Lybrand said.
“For a second, I thought, ‘That couldn’t happen.’ People don’t run across the street and kill kids.”
Cannon’s father, Austin Hinnant, heard the gunshot and rushed outside to find his injured son. “I screamed for somebody to help me,” Austin Hinnant told WRAL News. Austin Hinnant continued, “I scooped him (Cannon) up in my arms and held him. … His blood ran down my arms.”
Austin Hinnant said Darius Sessoms paced around frantically at the scene while ranting for a few minutes. Sessoms returned to his own house before getting in his vehicle and driving off.
After a 24-hour search, Wilson police arrested Sessoms and took him into custody, charging him with first-degree murder. WRAL reported that Mr. Sessoms’ parents believed their son was on drugs and hallucinating right before the shooting.
However, upon reviewing Darius Sessoms’ lengthy criminal record, he was a ticking time bomb - primed to explode.
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In March 2016, North Carolina convicted Darius Sessoms of felony firearms robbery.
In April 2016, North Carolina convicted Mr. Sessoms of a misdemeanor for maintaining a place for a controlled substance.
In November 2016, Sessoms received a felony conviction for marijuana possession.
In 2017, North Carolina revoked probation for Sessoms twice – in separate three-month stints in prison. At the time of the murder of Cannon Hinnant, Sessoms had two pending felonies. Both were for maintaining a vehicle, dwelling, or place for controlled substances.
However, what could be the motive and reasoning for the cold-blooded execution of a five-year-old child? Why did a man with an extensive criminal record and a history of probation revocations have access to a firearm?
At Cannon Hinnant’s funeral service, his grandfather Merrill Race said, “…we shouldn’t even be here. That’s evil. I never met this guy in my life, but that is one evil dude.”
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The Black Lives Matter movement logo. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Cannon Hinnant’s death is symbolic of America’s failing public safety and public health systems.
In addition, Darius Sessoms murdered Cannon Hinnant during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. BLM successfully leveraged the deaths of poor African American men to push for radical left-wing law enforcement and criminal justice reforms.
Liberal policies like “Defunding the Police,” leniency on bail requirements for repeat criminal offenders, and release for non-violent petty offenses are a direct result of BLM-influenced political and mass media advocacy from 2014 through 2020. Yet, the stark rise in violent crime and petty thefts after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic from 2020 through 2023 revealed the folly of separating public safety from an effective intersection with public health policy analysis.
Black Lives Matter “leaders” and media advocates did not have a comprehensive understanding of public safety nor an advanced and rigorous set of evidence-based social science proof for their criminal justice reform policy objectives.
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Photo image by Jéan Béller on Unsplash.
BLM is simply a group of social media influencers who somehow convinced left-wing District Attorneys, liberal prosecutors, and progressive politicians that their unproven criminal reform theories were valid.
The Black Lives Matter movement lost legitimacy after questions regarding financial accountability for the millions of dollars the core group raised in 2020 continuously went unanswered. People who donated to BLM in 2020 are hungry for information about the organization’s finances. BLM leaders’ reluctance to open their organizational bookkeeping process persists. Where has all that money gone?
The BLM group is attempting to reemerge as Vice President Kamala Harris’ Presidential campaign gains momentum. Do not drink the BLM “Kool-Aid.”