In a Tuesday tweet, former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) invoked the murder of Australian student Christopher Lane to criticize President Barack Obama over his remarks on the Trayvon Martin shooting.
West tweeted:
West, who left office in January after losing his reelection bid to Democrat Patrick Murphy, has been a vocal critic of Obama's response to Martin's death.
"I believe it comes back to being a respectful young man and maybe that's something that was missing out of President Obama and Trayvon Martin's life," West said in an interview . "But to try to play this and try to make it a personal experience, this was just absolutely horrific."
Obama, speaking days after a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of murder in the Martin case, made a rare personal statement on Martin's death during an unexpected appearance at a White House briefing last month.
"When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is, Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago," Obama said.
Lane, a 22-year-old Australian college baseball player, was shot to death in Oklahoma last week. NBC News reports:
James Francis Edwards Jr., 15, and Chancey Allen Luna, 16, were charged with murder. A third teenager, Michael Dewayne Jones, 17, was charged with being an accessory to murder after the fact and with firing a weapon. All were charged as adults, according to the Stephens County District Attorney’s Office.
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“They saw Christopher go by, and one of them said: ‘There’s our target,’” the [police] chief, Danny Ford, told the AP. “The boy who has talked to us said, ‘We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.’”