Justice has left Lyon County. Things are happening here that get hardly any official attention and almost no public exposure.
Last winter a young man named Domingo Hernandez was discovered burned alive in a mobile home miles from where he had last been seen.
When he left the last location, he was in no condition to walk anywhere, let alone to an out-of-the-way mobile home on the other side of the valley. After the fire was put out, the authorities assumed that the young man had started a fire in the bathroom and then fell asleep in the tub, where he died.
There seemed to be no reason to suspect such an event - the authorities decided that a young immigrant man wasn't smart enough to not set himself on fire in suspicious circumstances. Requests by the man's family for information and further investigation were simply met with a bureaucratic run-around.
To this day nobody knows what happened that night, and nobody in government seems interested in finding out.
Earlier this year, Margarito Leon was killed on the highway by a man who had had too much to drink. When the other driver was finally tested for alcohol several hours after the crash, he still had a .066 blood-alcohol content.
Recently, "justice" was served by the man being sentenced to four months (time served) in jail, and an admonition from the judge to not get in trouble again after he's been drinking.
Margarito's son and nephew (who were both in the wreck) have permanent damage, and his widow is left without a husband or means of support.
Now imagine for a moment how loud the outcry would have been if the roles had been reversed, and an Anglo husband and father had been killed by an immigrant who had been drinking. Or imagine the investigation if instead of a 19-year-old immigrant, a local Anglo teenager had been found in a burned-out mobile home under suspicious circumstances.
People come to the United States because we are supposed to be the promised land. We are supposed to be the shining star of justice, freedom and prosperity for all people. But as these two particular examples show, we sometimes fall very, very short of our ideals.
We call on the citizens of Northern Nevada, and the entire country, to stand up to the role that God has given our country as a place where people are treated equally. We call on everyone to help give a voice to those who are voiceless.
Lastly, we call for us to hold our officials accountable when they turn a cold shoulder to the concerns of those people they think nobody cares about.
We call on people to care.
• The Life, Peace and Justice Committee of Holy Family Catholic Church, Yerington, includes Brennan Paterson, Fr. Jorge Herrera, Theresa Snyder, Jim Snyder, Bunny Snyder, Helen Pipoli, Wendy Rigney, Henry Crume, Ricardo Contreras, AnnaJean Hannston, Kathie Toigo, Jeannine Gardella and Keith Gardella.