How not cooperating could lead to more heartache and pain for a family? Have you ever thought with a gunman or gun woman on the loose you or family could be next?

Have you ever thought that if you were to, for just a second, shed yourself from the shackles of street or gang mentality you might actually be doing yourself a favor instead of being a coward and not telling the cops what you know?

We addressed this somewhat in column form in October but the message bears repeating and repeating again.

We received a message this week inquiring what was going on with the Jeffrey Cotton shooting death investigation.

It was a question worth asking the sheriff's office this morning and the answer we got was none too pleasing.

From the tone of the conversation this morning, Lieutenant Bobby Martin is frustrated and his frustration makes us frustrated.

That frustration is born of an eery cloud that has been cast over this case and that cloud is silence, silence from people who surely know something, saw something, heard something.

It angers us the going trend is not to cooperate with law enforcement, but instead to complain that authorities are doing nothing to solve the case.

The truth is, the ones who don't talk are the ones who are not solving the case and if they stopped and thought about it long enough, their silence is keeping killers on the streets.

There is only so much law enforcement can do, detectives can process crime scenes, collect evidence but when a crime is committed amongst a throng of angry people, they need help and there is no help forthcoming because of some ill-advised street credo that forbids talking to police.

It is a silence that is as deadly as the actual crime itself because within your pledge to keep your allegiances pure, you are doing nothing but raising the stakes in a deadly game and don't think it couldn't happen to you.

We suppose it doesn't matter that withholding information is a crime. We suppose it doesn't matter that officers go to great lengths to protect witnesses.

Lastly, we suppose it doesn't matter that on Christmas, a mother and family is trying to get answers and there are none that seem to be forthcoming because it would appear you are uncool for cooperating when you are ultimately being uncool by keeping knowledge that could save someone else in your feeble minds.

Is your moral fiber that weak that you can't just tell a shred of something you know? This isn't the movies. This is Halifax County and the person or persons who shot and killed Cotton, possibly by misfire or possibly intentionally, are not concerned with whether information is given, they're just concerned about protecting their necks and lying low so they don't get caught.

We see this every day and, we may be jinxing ourselves, but we run across people we report on now and then and they seem unconcerned that we reported on them, just give us a sneer and move on.

The sad thing is, if something happened to one of the family members who were keeping so quiet on the Cotton case, we believe they would be singing a different tune, that it would be them emailing us and asking why the cops aren't doing anything, why, and we quote, “they just sitting on their butts eating donuts.”

We have come to know Lieutenant Martin as an officer of integrity and we believe him when he says no one at the sheriff's office is sitting still on this case. Some 20 to 30 interviews in the wake of this shooting tell us he's not.

We hear it too often, occasionally witness it ourselves, this faux credo of not snitching. This is what's creating the problems in this investigation. It's not the cops, but the ones who know something but are living by some oath to some gang who may end up betraying them that is the hinderance. Prove it to us otherwise and we'll believe it.

Those who know something have a moral obligation to speak up so the sheriff's office can get this case solved and think about this, your silence down the road could kill someone else, possibly a loved one or yourself — Editor