‘Too Soon’ Not Soon Enough For Peter Vecsey on Cleanthony Early Shooting

As Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel would tell you, it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever. It’s a line that many of us walk everyday on social media, where one-liners and zingers at the expense of people in the news are how we make our bread & butter (or RTs and Likes, as it were). 

Another way to consider it is that there’s a big difference between being in a safe zone to make jokes and being “too soon.”

Early Wednesday morning, New York Knicks forward Cleanthony Early was robbed and shot in the right knee outside of a Queens strip club by a group of men. The robbery occurred when the Uber that Early and his girlfriend were taking was boxed in by three cars, leaving him with little opportunity to get away. He was then taken to a hospital and is said to be in stable condition with non life-threatening injuries.

From the onset, that sounds like an extremely scary and harrowing experience for anyone to go through. Though it sounds like Early will come away from the incident in relatively-good health (except for the bullet-hole in his leg), it’s certainly way too soon for anyone to be cracking jokes at his expense, at least until full details are known.

Enter Peter Vecsey, just four hours later…

Pretty sad that robbers got off one more shot than Early did last night. That’d never happen to Melo…

— Peter Vecsey (@PeterVecsey1) December 30, 2015.

You know the old saying, “May you be in heaven a full half-hour before the New York Media knows you’re dead.”