When Democrats embraced “criminal justice reform,” the consequences were predictable, especially to anyone who remembers the 1970s, an era of lawlessness that inspired movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish. The basic idea behind New York’s misguided 2019 “bail reform” law was that it was racist to keep suspects locked up before trial unless they could find someone to post their bail. Why was it racist? “Disparate impact” — i.e., because more black and Hispanic suspects than whites were kept in jail. This is an interesting theory, but the Democrats who insisted on changing the law, to release most suspects without requiring cash bail, apparently didn’t stop to consider all the possible ramifications of this so-called “reform.” There has been a dramatic increase in violent crime which has been particularly harmful to blacks and Hispanics, there very people on whose behalf the “reform” was promoted, reminding us of what Ronald Reagan said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”
Republican congressman Lee Zeldin is running for governor of New York and has targeted the state’s bail reform law as a main part of his tough-on-crime agenda, He was actually giving a speech on this topic last week at a Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge when he was attacked onstage. His attacker David Jakubonis is an Iraq War veteran with a history of alcoholism who was apparently drunk at the time. Under New York’s “bail reform,” a state judge released Jakubonis on his own recognizance (i.e., without bail), but the feds were like, “Uh uh”:
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of New York announced David Jakubonis, the suspect in the attack on Rep. Lee Zeldin, faces a federal assault charge.
The attack occurred during a campaign stop. Zeldin is the GOP gubernatorial candidate.
“Title 18, United States Code, Section 351(e) makes it a federal crime to willfully assault a Member of Congress,” the filing says. “Section 351(e) provides for an increased penalty where the assault involves the use of a dangerous weapon.” . . .
The judge released Jakubonis on his own recognizance.
That changed on Saturday when “FBI, New York state police and the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office took him into custody.” He went in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Marian W. Payson.
Jakubonis is now behind bars.
The Department of Justice said Jakubonis “is due back in federal court Wednesday morning.”
Where he belongs, I hasten to add. Note that the J6 rioters were held without bail for months on end, but this guy attacks a congressman? Oh, New York was just going to turn him loose, because apparently attacking congressmen in New York is OK, as long as it’s a Republican congressman. This situation handed Zeldin a perfect example of the problems caused by turning the state over to corrupt Democrats like Kathy Hochul. Given the growing evidence pointing to a massive “red wave” in November, I expect Hochul (and many other Democrats in New York) will soon have plenty of leisure to contemplate their errors.
Have you forgotten Augustus Claudius Romain, Jr., the Brooklyn native who styles himself “Gazi Kodzo,” supreme commander of the Black Hammer Organization? I wrote about Romain/“Kodzo” in February (“The Destructive Cult of Racial ‘Liberation’”) as the group tried and failed to build their own “community” in Colorado:
For the followers of Black Hammer, their “take back the land” dream ended with what can only be called a sort of radical Fyre Festival, a bummer of a bad camping trip, with a few minor injuries. But there is no guarantee that the next radical gesture will end so harmlessly.
After that dream fell apart, Romain/“Kodzo” and his remaining followers relocated to Atlanta, where things apparently went downhill badly:
The group regularly gathers in downtown’s Woodruff Park to hand out food and clothing to the homeless as members proselytize over a megaphone. In November, Atlanta police arrested several members of the group, including Kodzo, when they refused an order to turn down the amplifier that was violating the city’s noise ordinance, according to a police report. When the police went to arrest Kodzo other members of the group began pushing officers, according to the report.
Kodzo and several other Hammers were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction of police. Officers seized a .45-caliber handgun and two-way radios, among other items, according to the reports.
Last year, members of the group who were closest to Kodzo moved into a rented house in a suburban southside neighborhood in Riverdale. The group was evicted in December and owed $21,000 in unpaid rent, attorney’s fees and other charges, according to records in Clayton County State Court. Public records indicate the group then took up residence in the Fayetteville home that was the scene Tuesday’s shooting.
Now, we will get to Tuesday’s shooting in a minute, but let me clear up something that seems to be causing a problem for some journalists.
Notice the word “cult” is inside quotation marks in that Daily Beast headline, as if they’re afraid of being sued for libel if they state, as a fact, that Black Hammer is a cult — which it most definitely is, and we ought not be tiptoeing around that fact as if we’re scared of it. Good journalism at times requires courage, the kind of courage that involves publishing the truth and defending it. Having gone to trial to defend myself in such a situation, I do not say this casually. If you’re a journalist who’s afraid to call a cult a cult, maybe you need to find some other line of work.
Romain was born in Brooklyn and grew up around Atlanta. In his early 20s, he went to Los Angeles and apparently worked as some kind of personal assistant for the head of a small modeling agency, helping to stage “mansion parties,” among other things. Sometime after 2015, Romain was recruited by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and moved to the party’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida, where his duties were mainly about running social-media accounts. In 2018, Romain — now calling himself Kodzo — left the APSP and moved back to Atlanta, where he established the Black Hammer Organization in February 2019. Romain/Kodzo claimed he quit the APSP because it was secretly controlled by white people; the APSP says he was expelled for unspecified misconduct. You can believe whatever you want, but the point is that he learned his ideology and tactics at one black “liberation” organization and then employed this knowledge to create his own organization with himself as “Commander-in-Chief.”
The key to Black Hammer was, first, its leader’s large following on social media and, second, his knowledge of radical organizing tactics. He already had a large following on Twitter and Facebook before he started Black Hammer, and his experience with the APSP gave him a level of prestige that put him far above the vulnerable young people he attracted to his organization, so that his leadership — his words, his ideology, his actions — were exempt from criticism. Without him, there was no Black Hammer, and therefore, to be a member of the organization was to be an idolatrous servant of the Supreme Commander. This is a cult.
Would any sane person be associated with this dangerous kook? I think not, but as I said, Black Hammer attracted vulnerable young people, and by “vulnerable,” of course I mean, a few fries short of a Happy Meal. The very fact that someone was involved in this cult was evidence of their mental deficiency, because rational and intelligent people would never go anywhere near a group led by such an obvious crackpot.
There is a factor of self-selection in the membership of cults. People who are generally successful in life are seldom enthralled by the radical promise of “liberation,” and people with a healthy sense of street-wise skepticism — i.e., those with a functional bullshit detector — would be suspicious of anyone calling himself the Supreme Commander. If you’ve read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, you know that such movements tend to attract people who can be categorized as misfits. So you collect together a bunch of misfits, who don’t have a lot going for them in terms of career success or social popularity, and who furthermore are naïve enough to fall for the radical promise of “liberation,” and what you have is a recipe for disaster. The Khmer Rouge, Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate — these things never have a happy ending. It was therefore foreseeable that Black Hammer would ultimately end with some headline-making debacle, even if the specifics could not be predicted. And thus we turn to events in Fayetteville:
The home linked to Tuesday’s SWAT standoff, alleged kidnapping and deadly shooting in Fayetteville is a communal house of Atlanta-based extremist organization, the Black Hammer Party, whose leader was arrested in connection to the episode, according to police.
The group’s leader, Augustus C. Romain, 36, was charged with 11 felony counts, including party to the crime of false imprisonment, party to the crime of kidnapping, party to the crime of aggravated assault, criminal street gang activity, criminal conspiracy to commit a felony and aggravated sodomy, according to a press release issued Wednesday by the Fayetteville Police Department.
(Whoa — “aggravated sodomy”? We eagerly await the police affidavit that gives us the tawdry details behind that charge.)
A second person who lived at the home, Xavier H. Rushin, 21, was charged in the incident with a misdemeanor and 10 felonies, including kidnapping, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal street gang activity, the release said.
Fayetteville Police said they received a 911 call Tuesday morning at 7:48 a.m. from “a person whispering that they had been kidnapped by an organization and was being held in the garage of a residence.” Police said they located the residence by tracing the call.
The hours-long standoff, which resulted in a neighborhood shelter-in-place order, ended Tuesday afternoon when officers discovered a person inside the home shot dead, police said.
When officers responded to the residence in the Woodbyne subdivision off White Road, a group of nine people exited the home, but one person remained inside, a police press release said.
Police observed a person waving their hand from a garage window, the release said. Officers also approached a person outside the residence and they attempted to flee, the release said. The police press release did not identify that person.
The shelter-in-place order remained in effect for several hours as a SWAT unit responded. Police eventually sent a robot into the home for further investigation and discovered a person who remained inside was dead, the spokesman said. With the robot’s help, the house was surveyed and the lockdown lifted around 2:15 p.m.
The deceased person was found in the home with a gunshot wound to the head. The Black Hammer group’s social media posts identified the man as one of their members. Police said the man was 18, but the AJC is not identifying him because he appears to be a suicide victim. Officials said they believe the gunshot wound to the head was self-inflicted.
The AJC won’t name him, but the dead teenager was Amonte Ammons, who was hailed by Black Hammer as their “Minister of Defense,” and who is alleged to have been kidnapped, beaten and forcibly sodomized by Romain/“Kodzo.” Now, I don’t know what the word “liberation” means to you, but that sure doesn’t sound like my idea of liberation.
Gazi Kodzo’s police booking mug shot
Fayette County is a prosperous suburban community where President Trump got 52% of the vote in 2020, so it’s not likely that the would-be revolutionary (and accused rapist) “Gazi Kodzo” can expect lenient treatment from the criminal justice system there. They’re going to send him to Reidsville, and probably for a long, long time.
He’s certainly not likely to be suing anyone for libel, so there is no reason for any journalist to hesitate to call Black Hammer a cult.
Aspiring Rapper North American euphemism for a member of the urban criminal class. This unusual occupation is usually mentioned in conjunction with the subject either being slain or being taken into custody for a violent or property-related crime. A relative of the subject usually points out that the subject’s demise or incarceration comes at an extremely inopportune moment, occurring just as the subject was “turning they(sic) life around.”
It’s been a while since we updated our readers on the leisure life of the hiphop community, who have been keeping law enforcement busy. We begin in Chicago, where 29-year-old Mario Austin, a/k/a King Lil Jay, has been arrested on weapons charges. King Lil Jay just got out of prison on parole in April after serving seven years on a murder conspiracy charge connected to the 2015 death of his associate Filmon Rezene in a shootout with a drug dealer. One of King Lil Jay’s fans said the rapper “didn’t deserve” to be arrested as a felon in possession of a firearm, arguing that in “Chiraq” (as they call Chicago, where the casualty rate is like the Iraq War), King Lil Jay had a lot of “opps on the street” (enemies) and therefore was “staying strapped” (armed) “out of necessity of safety.”
Tione Jayden Merritt, a/k/a Lil Tjay
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Tione Jayden Merritt a/k/a Lil Tjay is recovering after being shot multiple times when “gunfire erupted at a Chipotle restaurant at a residential and outdoor shopping center in Edgewater” June 22. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I go to Chipotle for a bowl of barbacoa, rice and beans, I don’t expect to be dodging gunfire, so what’s the deal in Edgewater, N.J.? It’s right across the Hudson River from Harlem, and this proximity may explain why Lil Tjay was the target of a “botched robbery” for which police in Bergen County arrested Mohamed Konate, 27, of New York City. Police also arrested “Jeffrey Valdez, 24, and Antoine Boyd, 22, both of the Bronx, who were with the rapper and allegedly armed” — allegedly! Man, you take your Bronx crew down to Chipotle in New Jersey for some barbacoa and beans, and they can’t even protect you from a robber, even though they’re “allegedly” armed? Don’t know about you, but if my security crew was so incompetent, I ain’t gonna pay extra for their guacamole.
Ethan Reyes, a/k/a Notti Osama
Meanwhile, in New York, a sad ending for a promising young performer, as 14-year-old Ethan Reyes, a/k/a Notti Osama, got stabbed to death “during a scuffle with a 15-year-old rival” July 9 at a West Harlem subway station. The 15-year-old suspect “had an ongoing feud” with Notti Osama, sources told the New York Post, but “it wasn’t immediately clear what it was about. Reyes initially pushed the other boy on the [subway] tracks, sources said. He was then stabbed and tried to run but collapsed on the subway station’s steps, according to police sources.” Obviously, this highlights the need for common-sense knife reform laws.
Minneapolis has proved itself a lucrative source of income for Ben Crump, who got his share of a $27 million settlement on a wrongful death claim in the George Floyd case, so now he’s back for another bite with the case of 20-year-old Andrew “Tekie” Sundberg. It is unknown what led to Sundberg’s mental health crisis prior to the six-hour armed standoff that began about 9:30 p.m. when a neighbor (about whom, more in a minute) called 911 to report that Sundberg had fired a gun through the walls of her apartment. Sundberg then holed up in his third-floor apartment while police evacuated the building, set up a perimeter and tried to negotiate his surrender. This continued until about 4:30 a.m. Thursday, when two SWAT team snipers posted on a nearby roof shot Sundberg.
“Tekie” was 4 years old when he was adopted from Ethiopia by Mark and Cindy Sundberg, who said in a statement:
Like millions in America and worldwide, Tekle struggled with his mental health. While we have received very little information thus far, by all accounts, it sounds like our Tekle was suffering from a mental health crisis. . . . The family has been given very little information about why Tekle’s mental health crisis became a death sentence.
Was this basically a “suicide by cop” situation? Trust me, it’s not just black people that get shot by cops in such situations. How many YouTube videos have I watched of bodycam footage where the cops are trying to “de-escalate,” pleading with the suspect — “Just drop the knife, man, so we can talk” — before he finally charges at them and gets shot? This kind of scenario is common enough that I’ve seen it play out dozens of times on YouTube, and involves crazy people of all races and ethnicities, so I can definitely say Cindy Sundberg is wrong about this:
Cindy Sundberg, who is white, said she believes her son would still be alive if he was white like her biological children. “Everyone knows had it been a white person in that building, they would have talked him out, they would have waited,” she said.
Not true, but so far, we don’t know what it was that prompted the SWAT team snipers to shoot, and it would be irresponsible to speculate. But what went wrong with Tekie?
Steve Scofield coached Sundberg for two years when he was in 7th and 8th grade, and remembered him as a “sweet” kid. Tekle and Scofield’s son were friends.
“He had a big heart, really sweet kid,” Scofield said. “When I saw him a couple years ago when he was an adult, we hugged. He always struck me as a really sweet, misunderstood kid.” . . .
“I just feel like he didn’t get the support he needed, because the Tekle that I knew was just the sweetest kid,” Scofield said. “Every time I saw him, we hugged and we just exchanged kind words. He seemed like a really sweet person to me.”
He last saw Sundberg a few years ago.
“A few years ago my wife and I were out eating and he just happened to work at the restaurant,” Scofield said. “As usual, I gave him a big hug. We talked for a few minutes, and just asked how he was doing. That was the last I saw him.”
His parents said he “struggled with mental health” without getting more specific, and Tekie’s former soccer coach said that Tekie was working at a restaurant “a couple years ago,” so what can explain this descent into deadly madness? When protesters held a “Justice for Tekie” rally outside the apartment building where he was killed, they were interrupted by the woman whose 911 call led to the SWAT standoff:
A Minneapolis mother of two was seen on video confronting protesters who gathered outside of an apartment building where a Black man, Andrew “Teckle” Sundberg, was shot and killed by police last Thursday. “This is not a George Floyd situation. George Floyd was unarmed. This is not okay,” the mother, identified as Arabella Foss-Yarbrough, was seen on video yelling at a group of protesters on Saturday.
Foss-Yarbrough was the neighbor of Sundberg, and said he shot up her apartment Wednesday evening while she was cooking for her 2- and 4-year-old sons, Fox 9 reported. She said the bullets ripped through her apartment, and nearly left her family dead or injured. . . .
“My kids have to deal with this and probably have a mental illness now because they almost lost their lives. There’s bullet holes in my kitchen because he sat in the f–ing hallway watching me move,” she said while confronting the protesters. “He tried to kill me in front of my kids.” . . .
Foss-Yarbrough called police during the shooting on Wednesday, who helped the family escape. As police responded to evacuate the building, “officers started taking fire,” according to a search warrant. The incident led to a six-hour standoff between police and Sundberg, which ended when two Minneapolis snipers shot the 20-year-old. “I have Black children; I am a woman of color!” Foss-Yarbrough, who is of Black, white and Native descent according to the star Tribune, yelled at the demonstrators. “If I would have lost my life, would you guys do this for me?”
Things boiled over during Saturday’s rally and march for Tekle Sundberg, when the 24 year old woman who says he was shooting into her apt. showed up voicing her frustration with those gathering in front of her building on Sundberg’s behalf. @kare11 * video contains profanity * pic.twitter.com/qdi1vbgO7k
Yeah, where’s her “social justice”? No matter how much sympathy one might have for “Tekie” Sundberg, the fact remains that he was armed and had fired shots that endangered this woman and her children. However, the incident that precipitated this standoff was not the first time Andrea Foss-Yarbrough had a problem with “Tekie” Sundberg. According to a GoFundMe page set up by her older sister, Sundberg “had been harassing her and stalking [Foss-Yarbrough] for months.” Gosh, isn’t it strange that the media covering this case haven’t followed up on that clue? If I were an editor at a local newspaper in Minneapolis, I’d be expecting my reporters to follow that lead and get to the bottom of it: What was the nature of Sundberg’s “harrassing . . . and stalking behavior” toward this woman? Was it some sort of erotic fixation? Were there other neighbors who felt threatened by Sundberg’s behavior? What about his employment situation? Was he still working? Had he been under psychiatric care? Was there a diagnosis of his mental illness? Was he off his meds?
But we don’t have answers to any of those questions, because apparently the local media in Minneapolis doesn’t know how to follow-up on leads, so all we can say now is what we’ve been saying for years:
Say hello to Demetrius Minor, who was 16 when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison after a plea bargain on manslaughter and carjacking charges in 2011 in Camden County, New Jersey:
A Gloucester Township teenager has admitted to killing his foster father in July.
Demetrius Minor, 16, pleaded guilty Friday to aggravated manslaughter in the July 11 death of Theotis Butts. Minor also pleaded guilty to carjacking in connection with a May 29 incident in which he ordered a couple out of their Pontiac Grand Prix at gunpoint and drove away with their vehicle . . .
The May carjacking incident began shortly before 5 p.m. when Minor approached a couple as they entered their vehicle near their Gloucester Township home. Minor approached the couple and pointed a Glock .45 in the face of the woman. The couple’s infant child was in the car at the time of the incident, and they were able to get the baby out of the car before Minor sped away in their car. The woman’s husband tried to chase Minor in another vehicle but lost track of him. About two hours later in Bridgeton, local police officers who had been alerted to the car theft spotted the Grand Prix and pursued. That pursuit ended when Minor jumped out of the vehicle and escaped.
A warrant had been issued for Minor’s arrest in connection with the carjacking when he broke into Butts’ home on the first block of Hemlock Drive in Gloucester Township on July 11. Butts, a 67-year-old retiree, had taken Minor in from the foster system, though Minor was no longer living there. According to township police records, Minor had burglarized the home numerous times after moving out. Minor stabbed Butts several times and fled to New York City.
A transgender woman behind bars at a New Jersey women’s prison impregnated two fellow inmates, prompting officials to move her to a different facility, a report revealed Saturday.
Demi Minor, 27, was moved last month from the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women to the Garden State Youth Correctional Facility — a prison for young adults in Burlington County, a New Jersey Department of Corrections spokesman told NJ.com.
Minor, who is serving a 30-year sentence for manslaughter, is in a vulnerable unit in the new facility where she is the only woman, the spokesman said.
Minor wrote in a blog post on the website Justice 4 Demi on July 15 that she was placed on suicide watch at the new facility “due to the fact that I had hung myself in the van.” She claimed guards denied her request to be strip-searched by a female DOC officer.
“[NJDOC] have violated my right to be safe and free from sexual harassment, by putting me in one of the most violent youth Correctional facilities,” Minor wrote. “While living here at GYSC, I have found my self (sic) under attack by young inmates who are immature and just plain ignorant towards a person like me.”
She said she was briefly transferred to New Jersey State Prison, where she “was called he and him well over 30 times,” adding, “this has not happened to me in years being referred to primarily as a man.”
An earlier post stated that Minor was forcibly removed from the female prison and beaten during the transfer. The DOC declined to comment on the accusations but told NJ.com it was investigating.
“NJDOC cannot comment on any active investigations,” the agency said. “The Department has zero tolerance for abuse, and the safety and security of the incarcerated population and staff are of critical importance.”
Minor’s move comes months after it was revealed that she had impregnated two inmates while locked up at the female prison after engaging in “consensual sexual relationships with another incarcerated person.”
In 2021, New Jersey enacted a policy to allow prisoners to be housed in accordance with their preferred gender identity. The policy, which must be in place for at least a year, was part of a settlement from a civil rights suit brought by a woman forced to live in men’s prisons for 18 months.
The DOC told NJ.com it still operates under the policy but “the department is currently reviewing the policy for housing transgender incarcerated persons with the intention of implementing minor modifications.”
Housing decisions, the spokesman said, “are made within the parameters of the settlement agreement which requires consideration of gender identity and the health and safety of the individual.”
Minor will be eligible for parole in 2037, according to the outlet.
Notice that New Jersey did not defend the “civil rights” lawsuit in court, but rather reached an out-of-court settlement, so that the prison policy is not guided by any actual court ruling. There is no judge’s decision we can cite as responsible for this lunacy. Instead, it seems, New Jersey officials simply outsourced their prison policy to the ACLU and, gosh, who could have foreseen that this would produce bad results? Unexpectedly!
One of the things about political tribalism is that it encourages participants to think of politics as a fight for survival — Us and Them — in which there are no rules. The Democratic Party has made identity politics part of their core belief system, which interwoven with the strategic idea that demographic trends (particularly the growth of non-white minority populations) is the key to their obtaining uncontested political hegemony. This explains, among other things, why Donald Trump’s desire to enforce U.S. immigration law was regarded by Democrats as a species of “hate,” because they view unrestricted immigration as a means of rapidly growing the Hispanic which, in turn, they expect will ultimately provide Democrats with an insuperable electoral majority. This is not a “conspiracy theory”; it’s a synopsis of what has happened to California over the past 30 years, for example.
Democrats view illegal aliens as part of their party’s constituency, because of what we may dub The Future Democratic Voters Project, and as a consequence, will do anything necessary to prevent these law-breaking foreigners from being deported or otherwise inconvenienced. This is why, for example, Joe Biden has insisted that Border Patrol agents must be punished despite the fact that an investigation cleared them of wrongdoing — it’s a symbolic gesture of anti-Trump solidarity. And it’s also a major contributing factor to Trump Derangement Syndrome quite generally. Of all the things Trump did, what was really unforgivable from a Democratic (and establishment GOP) point of view was that he threatened to break up the Bipartisan Open Borders Consensus of which the late John McCain was a leader. Meanwhile, in Ohio . . .
WATCH: The mother of the Ohio 10/y rape victim tells Telemundo’s @MariaVargasPion that the child “is fine”, and “everything they say about (Gerson Flores) is a lie.” pic.twitter.com/Vtpyn404g7
This appears to confirm my thesis of a domestic situation wherein the confessed rapist is also the paramour of the victim’s mother (other familial relation is possible but less likely). Unfortunately, I saw many such cases while working as a court interpreter.
Other questions: what was the time gap between the initial reporting of the rape and the filing of criminal charges? Why did the referring abortion provider not report the rape to authorities? Was the child forced to live with her rapist in furtherance of an abortion narrative?
Journalists asking the important questions? Wow, what a concept!
Bonilla’s belief that (a) the mother of the girl is also an illegal alien, (b) the child rapist Gershon Fuentes is the family’s primary breadwinner, and therefore (c) the mother didn’t want Fuentes arrested for raping the girl, because (d) the whole family might get deported back to the sh**hole country they came from — probably explains a lot about how this story played out. The Indiana abortionist Dr. Caitlin Bernard apparently violated patient privacy laws by telling the media about this case, which she spun as proving why Ohio’s “extreme” abortion law was wrong. However, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost says the law has a “medical emergency” provision that would have permitted the girl to get an abortion (presumably because she is so young that pregnancy and childbirth would be traumatic). Is it possible that the girl was referred to an out-of-state clinic because Dr. Bernard was known to be “cooperative” in such situations? According to Fox News, in her paperwork on the case, Dr. Bernard claimed that the 10-year-old had been impregnated by another minor, i.e., she wasn’t really a victim of rape, so no criminal investigation, please? Selling this tale as a moral defense of unlimited abortion “rights” would have been more complicated if all the facts of the case were known, so in talking to reporters Dr. Bernard didn’t mention anything that would lead readers to suspect that the “Ohio girl” was actually a Mexican girl, probably in the country illegally, who was raped by her mother’s 27-year-old illegal alien boyfriend from Guatemala.
This explains the vagueness of the original story, which caused many of us to suspect it was a hoax: If a 10-year-old girl is pregnant, a crime has been committed, but the story said nothing about whether the child rapist had been arrested. And then, eventually, we learned that it was not until Tuesday — the day after PJM’s Megan Fox and Ohio Attorney General Yost appeared on Fox News — that cops arrested the rapist:
A detective testified Wednesday at an initial court appearance for the 27-year-old suspect that Columbus police learned about the girl’s pregnancy after her mother alerted Franklin County Children Services on June 22, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
Look at the calendar: Police were informed on Wednesday, June 22, but it was not until Tuesday, July 12, nearly three weeks later, that Fuentes was arrested. This raises more questions, including whether it was coincidental that Fuentes wasn’t arrested until afterMegan Fox and Dave Yost went on Fox News to raise hell about this story.
Despite everything going on here — the one-source story based on the word of an Indiana abortionist, the delay in arresting the perpetrator, the role of Biden’s open-border policy in enabling this criminal atrocity — still the media continue to act as if it’s a “gotcha” for Republicans:
All of these takes are so wrong that one supposes there must be a central campaign to organize this deliberate wrongness. Are Republicans “shocked a 10-year-old can get pregnant,” as NBC News claims? As if pregnant 10-year-olds are so ordinary — so commonplace — that we should not be shocked? Oh, by the way, while I’m at it, I should mention that this girl just turned 10, so it’s likely that her mother’s Guatemalan boyfriend got her pregnant when she was only nine, and may have been abusing the girl for who knows how long before the pregnancy occurred. And, as I said in my first post on this subject (“A Story Too Good to Check?” July 4), I actually did some research:
The extreme youth of the alleged victim is what made the headline so shocking, and I actually checked the National Institutes of Health to make sure I wasn’t alone in finding this highly unusual. The median age of menarche (i.e., onset of menstruation, generally taken as meaning when a female becomes physically capable of pregnancy) in the United States is 11.9, about three months earlier than in the 1990s. About 10% of females reach menarche by age 10. Precocious puberty is slightly correlated with earlier sexual activity — the median age of first intercourse is 15.4 for girls reaching menache by age 10, compared to 16.6 for girls reaching menarche at age 14 or older. In general, blacks and Hispanics reach menarche earlier than white girls, but the differences are not dramatic.
Still, a 10-year-old girl getting pregnant is rare enough in the United States that I had difficulty finding any statistical data on the phenomenon. When you’re talking about something with far less than a 1% probability, good luck finding reliable data.
* March 2009: A 10-year-old Haitian girl in Lantana, Florida, became pregnant after a 33-year-old man [Fede Datilus] raped her when she was 9. Her father learned of her pregnancy only when he took her to the clinic when she suffered labor contractions on March 18, 2009. The same day, she gave birth naturally to a full-term boy. . . . She confided that she had been afraid that she and her father would be deported to Haiti — a threat the rapist had used against her. Datilus was sentenced to life imprisonment for raping a minor under 12 years, to which 5 years for impregnating her was added.
* April 2008: Isabel Chasearez’s 10-year-old daughter, from St. Anthony, Idaho, gave birth by cesarean section to a girl weighing approximately 6 lb (2.7 kg) at Madison Memorial Hospital in Rexburg after her mother’s boyfriend [Guadalupe Gutierrez-Juarez] raped her. The man, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was jailed on one felony count of rape with impregnation; Chasearez was jailed as well for failing to provide proper prenatal care. Juarez was sentenced to 5 years to life.
* April 2006: A young girl in Abbeville, South Carolina, gave birth by cesarean section. Her 26-year-old stepfather, William Edward Ronca, raped her. The baby was placed up for adoption. Ronca admitted to having molested the girl over a two-year period and was sentenced to 25 years in prison and is currently incarcerated in the Allendale Correctional Institution.
Three times in more than 20 years. If you went all the way back to 1969 (i.e, more than 50 years), you’d only add five more cases to the list.
Pregnant 10-year-olds are very, very rare in the United States, but somewhat more common in Latin America and, while it would obviously be unfair to impugn the culture of an entire continent based on a relative handful of cases, a few examples will perhaps suffice to make the point:
BOLIVIA, 2010 — A 10-year-old girl from El Torno gave birth by cesarean section to a girl weighing 2.3 kg (5.1 lb) at the Instituto Maternológico Percy Boland in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Three of the girl’s brothers raped her. They were 15, 17, and 19. The youngest one was her child’s biological father.
BRAZIL, 2012 — In late December 2011, Antônio Lisboa Filho, age 28, discovered that his ten-and-a-half-year-old daughter, whom he had been raping regularly since she was eight, was 4 months pregnant. He fled from Coroatá, Maranhão with his wife Maria Alves Conceição and their other children, abandoning the girl with her maternal grandmother, Francisca Maria Conceição. Conceição alerted authorities of the rape and the parents’ subsequent escape. As the pregnancy had advanced past the legal cut-off date for abortions, the girl delivered the baby via cesarean section in early May 2012, a month before term. Police also suspected the man of raping the girl’s 8-year-old sister.
PERU, 2012 — Laura Marina Villanueva’s older sister’s 45-year-old companion, Gaudencio Castañeda Pulido, a former soldier and her neighbor, raped the girl three times, just before her birthday on June 24; he had previously impregnated the girl’s then-15-year-old sister. Her pregnancy was discovered in late September, at 19 weeks, by chance after she was admitted for a snake bite. Castañeda Pulido went on the run when the discovery was reported in the media and continued threatening to kill the girl and her mother, Nidia Villanueva Tolentino. On January 24, 2012, she delivered a 2.21 kilograms (4.9 lb) boy by cesarean section, whom she named Justin, after singer Justin Bieber. Castañeda Pulido was sentenced to 35 years in jail.
PARAGUAY, 2015 — The 10-year-old girl was brought to an Asunción hospital by her mother, who believed that she had a tumor, where doctors discovered that she was five months pregnant and alerted authorities. They told the mother that her daughter’s life was at risk and she requested permission from the Paraguayan government for an abortion, which was denied. The case caused debate nationally and abroad about Paraguay’s strict anti-abortion laws. The stepfather fled, but was arrested in Boquerón, Caazapá Department. He denied paternity but a DNA test came out positive. Mainumby’s mother had denounced Benítez for sexual abuse of her daughter four times in the previous year, yet authorities never intervened. After the pregnancy’s discovery, she was herself arrested and charged with negligence and sexual abuse of a child, and sentenced to two months in prison for the former.
This list could be extended quite a bit, because 10-year-old girls in Latin America have given birth to more than 20 babies since 2004. As I say, one can’t condemn an entire continent’s population based on a few extreme cases, but my point is that when I saw a story about a pregnant 10-year-old in Ohio, I assumed either (a) the story was phony or (b) this case involved immigrants, probably from Latin America.
So, what was presented by the media as a morality tale about the importance of abortion “rights” turns out to be, instead, a story about social problems caused by illegal immigration. Ace of Spades offers some enlightened legal commentary:
Question: If this mother had some kind of deal permitting this man sexual access to her nine year old child, and then couldn’t decide if she wanted to abort his baby or not… is this really the kind of thing we have to contort ourselves writing exceptions and corner-cases in the law to cover?
Does the law have to take into consideration every single monstrous perversion the human mind can contemplate?
And note that the Attorney General already stated he believes that this was all a lie from the start — that Ohio’s abortion law contains an “emergency medical exception” clause that would cover this case.
A thread collected at Twichy notes that we are discovering that there are quite a few r@pes of both the forcible and statutory kind which are never detected or punished — because Planned Parenthood dodges its reporting requirements and, of course, “disposes of the evidence.”
There are no “winners” in these stories, you see. The tribalism of identity politics inspired the media to try to score points at the expense of Republicans for outlawing abortion, to which we naturally objected and, once the facts were known, it seemed it might more appropriately be scored a loss for Democrats, as it is their open-borders policy that permitted this to happen in Ohio (instead of Mexico or Guatemala or some other miserable sh**thole country where such atrocities seem to be more common). It does no good for us to clutch our pearls and bemoan the media’s politically motivated promotion of misleading narratives, when the real problem is that the Democratic Party has irreversibly committed itself to every evil thing imaginable — from transgender toddlers to taxpayer-funded late-term abortion to transforming the country by importing millions of impoverished foreigners (who, of course, are expected to vote Democrat). They are the Party of Evil, the Party of Crime, the Party of Perversion. And our so-called “mainstream” media are merely Democratic operatives with bylines.
A Columbus man has been charged with impregnating a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose travel to Indiana to seek an abortion led to international attention following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and activation of Ohio’s abortion law.
(“A Columbus man.” Gotcha.)
Gershon Fuentes, 27, whose last known address was an apartment on Columbus’ Northwest Side, was arrested Tuesday after police say he confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions. He’s since been charged with rape, a felony of the first degree in Ohio.
Columbus police were made aware of the girl’s pregnancy through a referral by Franklin County Children Services that was made by her mother on June 22, Det. Jeffrey Huhn testified Wednesday morning at Fuentes’ arraignment. On June 30, the girl underwent a medical abortion in Indianapolis, Huhn said.
(My apologies for suspecting that this story was entirely made-up, but pregnant 10-year-olds are very rare in the United States, and the lack of corroborating detail in the media accounts led me to think this was like the “hate crime” hoax perpetrated by Jussie Smollett.)
Huhn also testified that DNA from the clinic in Indianapolis is being tested against samples from Fuentes, as well as the child’s siblings, to confirm contribution to the aborted fetus.
Franklin County Municipal Court Judge Cynthia Ebner said the case did not warrant Fuentes — who is believed to be undocumented — to be held without bond.
(Don’t you love the euphemism “believed to be undocumented” as a substitute for the plain English phrase “illegal alien”?)
Ebner said a high bond was necessary, however, due to Fuentes being a possible flight risk and for the safety of the child involved. Before being arrested, Huhn and Det. David Phillips collected a saliva sample from Fuentes, according to a probable cause statement. Ebner set a $2 million bond for Fuentes, who is being held in the Franklin County jail.
So now the liberals who elected Joe Biden, to support a policy of open borders, will raise money to bail out the child rapist Fuentes, who will then flee back to his miserable Third World homeland where pregnant 10-year-olds are significantly more common for obvious reasons. And the only “moral of the story” that the media will allow us to conclude is that ABORTION SHOULD ALWAYS BE LEGAL BECAUSE ZOMG! A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE! NO UTERUS, NO OPINION!
UPDATE: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) source has confirmed to Fox News that Fuentes is an illegal alien from Guatemala.
See this woman here? Stay away from her. She’s trouble.
For days, the media has been going berserk about Jose Alba, 61, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who was working July 1 in a bodega (which is what they call a mom-and-pop convenience store in New York City) when he was attacked and responded by fatally stabbing his attacker. Even though the self-defense case seems very strong, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (who, of course, was elected with money from George Soros) decided to charge Alba with second-degree murder, and had him jailed at Riker’s Island for six days on $250,000 bond before a judge reduced the bond to $50,000 and Alba was released last Thursday.
For more than a week, I’ve kind of half paid attention to this story, but it was not until today that I understood why this craziness happened — it’s that woman in the picture who caused the whole thing. She went into the bodega with her 10-year-old daughter and went to buy the girl a bag of chips when her Electronic Benefits Transfer card (EBT, which has replaced old-fashioned food stamps as a means of feeding the poor) got declined at the register. Alba, who was working the register, then took the bag of chips from the girl. This enraged the woman:
“You can’t touch my daughter. Don’t snatch that out of my daughter, you f–-king piece of sh–!”
Alba is not seen in the footage taking away the chips.
The woman goes on to say “I’m gonna bring my n– down here and he gonna f–k you up. My n— is gonna come down here right now and f–k you up!”
Alba says “That’s not my fault, it’s not working.” He continues to ring up sales, telling one customer of the girlfriend, “She don’t have money.”
It was the first of the month, which is when people get their food stamps (now EBT) in many places, but this woman “don’t have money,” as Alba said. And I don’t know what the situation was, but I know how I feel when, for whatever reason, I try to use my cash card and the transaction is declined. How I feel is embarrassed. Like, “What? I just got paid. Are you sure? Hang on, let me go call my wife,” and then go outside and have that phone conversation, trying to figure out what happened.
Never once in my life have I gotten angry at the clerk because a transaction was declined. It’s obviously not the clerk’s fault. Maybe it’s my wife’s fault, but probably it’s my fault, but never — not once — has it occurred to me to blame the clerk. What was this woman’s problem?
“I’m gonna bring my n– down here and he gonna f–k you up.”
Her n-word was Austin Simon, a 32-year-old with a lengthy criminal history, with arrests for robbery, assault and domestic violence. He went to state prison after being convicted in 2016 for assaulting a police officer. And somewhere along the line, Simon made the ultimately fatal mistake of getting involved with this crazy woman who starts a fight with a bodega clerk because her EBT card got declined for a bag of potato chips.
Simon shows up at the bodega, starts shoving Alba around and — surprise! — Alba grabs a box cutter and stabs Simon to death.
All because this woman’s EBT card got declined. And despite the fact that she was directly responsible for her boyfriend’s death — “I’m gonna bring my n– down here and he gonna f–k you up.” — this woman still apparently didn’t comprehend that it was entirely her fault:
The video shows a bloody Simon laying on the bodega floor and his girlfriend crying out, “That was over $3. Three f–king dollars. He snatched something out of my daughter…please help him.”
Oh, wait, ma’am — just five minutes earlier, you were telling this clerk how your n-word was going to f–k him up, but now that your n-word is bleeding out on the floor, you decide that maybe dying over “three f–king dollars” wasn’t worth it? Would have been OK with you, I assume, if your felon boyfriend had beaten that clerk into a coma, but when it turns out the old guy was capable of defending himself, suddenly it’s not fair?
Actions, consequences, some assembly required.
You know this lady has to be a Biden voter, right? And as for why Bragg decided to charge the old guy with murder, in what was clearly a case of self-defense, Ace explains: “Because the criminal class is among the Democrats’ most important constituencies.” Yes, and women who go crazy when their EBT cards get declined are another key constituency.
