Special comment.

Three Washington Post writers, Leonard Shapiro, Tony Kornheiser, and Michael Wilbon, have each expressed this sentiment, believing that Taylor being murdered in his own bedroom was some sort of karmaic payback for his past misdeeds.

Shapiro begins his Washington Post column hearkening back to a rookie symposium he attended, in which “a series of skits” was performed, each depicting a player in a dangerous situation and having to make a “potentially life-altering decision.”

He was only 24, the father of an 18-month-old baby girl who was also in the house along with her mother, Taylor’s girlfriend. And this was for real. No symposium. No actors. No questions and answers from the audience, and certainly no one around to yell “FREEZE!!!! before the madness in Miami escalated into murder. The consequence of who knows what?

The question for Shapiro is how exactly a man in his bedroom being accosted by someone with a gun relates to the skits performed at the rookie symposium. Based on what is currently known, Taylor had no opportunity to make a life-altering decision; he was not in control of the situation. And who exactly was escalating the “madness in Miami“? Certainly not the person whose home was being broken into; certainly not the person lying in his bed in the middle of the night.

At the moment, it is far too soon to draw any conclusions as to how or why this tragedy occurred, why another young black man is now dead from a gunshot wound in his own home, why another athlete, Michael Vick, Pacman Jones, Tank Johnson, and now Sean Taylor becomes headline news for all the wrong reasons.

While Shapiro feigns restraint by saying it is “far too soon” to jump to any conclusions, he makes several interesting connections in that one sentence. First, this is not a case of a man being shot in his home, this is a case of a black man being shot in his home. Another young black man — meaning it happens all the time, and part of it is Mr. Taylor’s fault. Perhaps that sentiment is part of the reason why the home invasions of NBA players Antoine Walker and Eddy Curry were glossed over in the sports media — after all, they are black; it’s routine for them.

By bringing in Vick, Jones and Johnson, three people involved in criminal activity over the past several months, Shapiro implicates Taylor in some sort of nefarious activity. He’s in the headlines for “all the wrong reasons“; whether or not those reasons are of his own making does not matter.

Shapiro attempts to justify himself by placing faux-judgment on others. He writes: “Certainly it would be terribly easy to rush toward some sort of instant judgment based on what we think we all knew about Taylor and the sort of life he once and for all we know, still led.”

It would be terribly easy for one to rush to judgment on something one knows nothing about. Terribly ignorant as well. Shapiro says that “for all we know“, Taylor was still engaged in dangerous activity. For all we know, Taylor was not.

Shapiro goes on to list all of the transgressions that have apparently earned Taylor an early coffin at age 24. “Could anyone honestly say they never saw this coming?“, he writes, before listing such atrocities as skipping a rookie symposium and disrespecting Joe Gibbs “for [skipping] mandatory offseason workouts and never calling to explain why.”

On the field, Taylor often was a thoroughly undisciplined player who loved to make bold statements with vicious and often dangerous hits that occasionally got him tossed from games. Clearly, he seemed to embrace the thug image on and off the field, and the fact that he rarely spoke to members of the media only enhanced his reputation as a moody, enigmatic athlete we hardly ever got to know.

Leonard Shapiro is implying that Sean Taylor somehow brought this on himself. Dirty plays during a football game, arrogant statements, and the embracing of that nebulous but all-serving “thug image” have earned Sean Taylor his death.

In the wake of his shooting, we are now hearing about a so-called new Sean Taylor, a guy who seemed to be getting his life back in order, perhaps because of the birth of his child. Maybe a light bulb finally went off in his head. He was even enjoying arguably the best season of his career until he was derailed by a knee injury two weeks ago.

The preceding comment may seen innocuous, should one ignore the “so-called” portion of it. The “so-called” new Sean Taylor, as if any maturation in the man was a put-on, or show, as if his true nature was evil — and Shapiro, and all right-minded people, could see through the act.

Whether or not Sean Taylor committed crimes in his life, whether or not he was arrogant, whether or not he committed dirty plays, it is an amazingly disrespectful to imply based on nothing but speculation that he brought his death on himself.

God forbid anyone have a checkered past. God forbid anyone act immature in their early twenties.

Shapiro is not alone in judging Mr. Taylor. His Washington Post colleagues, and the two hosts of Pardon the Interruption on ESPN, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, also found themselves less than broken up over Taylor’s death.

In a WashingtonPost.com chat session on Monday, prior to the news of Taylor’s death, Wilbon also blamed the victim.

I know how I feel about Taylor, and this latest news isn’t surprising in the least, not to me. Whether this incident is or isn’t random, Taylor grew up in a violent world, embraced it, claimed it, loved to run in it and refused to divorce himself from it. He ain’t the first and won’t be the last. We have no idea what happened, or if what we know now will be revised later. It’s sad, yes, but hardly surprising.

This is his fault, Wilbon implies. He deserved to be shot. Whether he wrote it or said it aloud, it is clear from his writing that Michael Wilbon believes Sean Taylor got what he deserved. He “embraced” and “loved” violence, which completely justifies his violent death.

There’s a ton of speculation about the details of his condition and the details of the incident, but this isn’t a blog and we’re not going to get into wild guessing and speculating here, though we will try and responsibly discuss other points of interest surrounding the latest strange episode relating to Taylor.

Again, I’m not the least bit surprised about the Taylor episode … why would I be considering his history, even since he joined the Redskins?

While Shapiro and Wilbon use Taylor’s past to smear him, Tony Kornheiser apparently cannot muster the energy to care. On PTI, Kornheiser told the story of how his daughter dealt with Taylor’s death.

She’s a Redskin fan. And she had tears in her eyes, you know, when she heard about this. She started to well up, as I imagine tens of thousands of people did in the Washington area. Because they’re fans. And they are invested in the team, and they are invested in the players. And I talked about the fact that Sean Taylor had trouble in his life. And she said, ‘but everything I read, dad, said that he attempted to turn his life around’. And she focused on the fact that he was shot in his own bedroom, of his own house, in the middle of the night.

And, you and I are cynical, and we’re cynical by trade. And we know that in the coming weeks, there’s going to be reporting in the Washington Post, and reporting in the Miami Herald, that’s going to peel away all the layers of this, and some of it is going to get very dicey. But there’s a part of me, when I listen to my daughter, that I thought ‘I wish I could be a fan’. I wish that I wasn’t so cynical, I wish that I felt those emotions — those honest emotions — that fans feel when they suffer this loss, because they care so much about these people.

Kornheiser’s comments were delivered without malice, in a sober tone. And yet, those may be the cruelest comments of all. The implication is that only fans, unable to see beyond their irrational, unconditional love of their team, could muster tears for a man who has been shot dead in his own home. One does not have to be a fan to feel sadness at Sean Taylor’s death — or any death under that circumstance — one simply has to have the human capacity for feeling.

Kornheiser implies that because fans are always willing to look the other way, they can ignore the impending ‘dicey’ news that will be reported in the coming weeks. The fans still have innocence, while the sportswriters are forced to be ‘realistic’ and prematurely condemn Taylor to some responsibility in his own demise.

Perhaps the sportswriters are being less realistic than inhuman.

Nobody knows exactly what happened to Sean Taylor as of yet. And certainly, nobody knows if indeed he may have been involved in activities that led to his death. However, it is the height of disrespect, and the lowest depth of ignorance, to assume that the man caused, and deserved, his death.

The three-headed monster from the Washington Post is not alone. The Associated Press put special focus on Taylor’s past misdeeds in initial articles surrounding his shooting on Monday, as documented by some in the blogosphere. ESPN.com writer Jemele Hill predictably put the blame for Taylor’s death on his being black, pointing out that the “leading cause of death for black men 15 to 24 is homicide.”