Benaiah Mcdonald RIP

   Benaiah Mcdonald jammed a lot of style into a too-short life, as the 23-year-old stylist died Feb 6 in Montreal of kidney failure, in connection with chronic sickle cell anemia.
   One narrative has it that he was forced to wait for a long time before receiving emergency hospital treatment, which might have altered his outcome. Coolopolis has not researched the veracity of this claim.
   Mcdonald attracted media focus after an incident which saw police respond to a noise complaint at his home in 2010 when he was a 15-year-old babysitting his siblings.
   The police visit escalated and Benaiah was forced to sit with  police in a cruiser for several hours overnight before being released without charges.
   His subsequent complaint to Quebec's Human Rights Tribunal was dismissed five years later, with victim's advocate Fo Niemi complaining that the decision took too long and that the complaint had arbitrarily been re-categorized into a more difficult-to-prove racial profiling a affair rather than just a case of discrimination.
   Nonetheless Benaiah, who had attended Westmount High School, carried on and put smiles on a lot of faces, with one friend recalling that a memory of expressing sadness over not having a nice dinner, so Benaiah rapidly organized a barbecue in his honour.
  His friend Antony Carle has saluted Benaiah, noting "You have changed a lot of people and the way they see themselves, including myself."
  Carle has undertaken to raise $10,000 for a funeral that would respect the young man's desire for such an event to be a celebration. Coolopolis is neither advising for or against donations but this is the link for those inclined to donate.