Category: Crime

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on

Say hello to Joshua Nazario, 22:

A relative said Nazario was plagued by mental health problems, and had bounced around from one family member to the next. An aunt said Nazario had been on drugs to control his schizophrenia, but that he had run out of his medication.
“He started acting strangely about two weeks ago” said his aunt Lourdes Nazario at the Bronx apartment where she gave him shelter. “His medication ran out. That’s when I found out he was schizophrenic.”
“His mom lives in Canada,” she said. “He drove to the border and left her car. He just walked through the woods and across the border about five months ago. They found him in a hospital in Buffalo.”
She said Nazario had been working passing out masks and hand sanitizers, but got fired.
“I took him in because no one wanted him,” the aunt said. “His mother never told me he had schizophrenia. I just found out two weeks ago. . . . He’s been staying here four months and I never knew.
“He started acting up when our mother started looking for an apartment for him. He said he didn’t want to leave,” she said. “I don’t know why the doctor didn’t prescribe another bottle. I started asking and that’s when I found out he was schizophrenic. Nobody gave me the details. They kept me in the dark.”

But I thought Canada had a world-class socialist healthcare system? Why would Nazario leave Canada and sneak across the border into the United States? Because he’s a psycho who wants to stab people:

Thirty years in the big city, through crime waves and violent shooting sprees, the worst that had ever happened to Kelli Daley was a low-level robbery.
“I was mugged when I first moved here when I was like 20,” Daley said, the unfortunate experience a distant memory now. “They just grabbed my purse then ran away.”
Thirty years, nothing. Then suddenly Daley found herself bleeding on a dirty subway platform, the latest victim in a string of savage subway stabbings that have unnerved commuters returning to a transit system just awakening from a pandemic slumber.
Cops said Daley, 54, was stabbed Wednesday night [May 19] by a deranged man at a Union Square station.
The woman, who didn’t know her attacker, was knifed repeatedly in the collar bone and the back of her shoulder, cops said. She was taken to Bellevue Hospital to get stitches for several deep cuts.
Daley was waiting for a train on the southbound N/Q/R/W platform around 10 p.m. Wednesday when suspect Joshua Nazario, 22, crept up from behind and started hacking away at her neck and shoulders, cops said.
They said the bloodshed could have been a lot worse had it not been for a horrified witness who sprang into action and ran to Daley’s defense.
Passenger Sean Conaboy, 52, tackled and disarmed the subway slasher before he could do any more harm to Daley or anyone else, pinning him to the platform in a headlock before police came and hauled him away.
A still-stunned Daley said that in the time it takes for the subway doors to open, she went from being annoyed over missing her train to being unnerved by the unprovoked attack. . . .
Conaboy, a freelance cameraman for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., heard Daley’s screams. But even before that, he said he noticed something out of place.
Conaboy said he was on his way home from a 12-hour shift when he saw a suspicious man lurking in the station dressed in winter clothes on what turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far.
“I looked at his face, as he walked past me,” Conaboy said. “He looked in my eyes.”
The man then disappeared from Conaboy’s view.
“It was in that instant that I saw a woman,” he said. “She got pulled back out of my line of sight, away from the platform edge, and I heard a scream. And then I saw the knife come out from behind the column, in a full grip in a downward jagged position.”
The column was blocking Conaboy’s view but, “the knife and the hand were clearly visible,” Conaboy said.
“It was alarming to see a knife that big,” he said.
“I immediately ran to that spot,” he said, “Then I just jumped on his back and I tackled him. Then I was on top of him. At this point, I don’t know where the knife is. At some point in the scuffle, the woman got out and escaped.”
Conaboy said he was concerned about getting stabbed himself during the commotion, but someone kicked the knife out of the attacker’s hand after Conaboy wrestled him to the ground.
“I knew as long as he had that knife that I was in very serious danger,” Conaboy said. “I knew if he turned to face me that I’m going to be stabbed.”
Conaboy managed to get the man in a headlock.
“I pulled his hair to grab his head and put my forearm under his chin and pressed it up against his throat,” Conaboy said. “Somebody said ‘I got him! I got him!’ Someone did in fact have him by the ankles, but I’m still on top of him. Then I heard, ‘Police! Police!’ At that point, I relinquished him.”

Video of the attack from self-defense coach John Correia:

 

The video is shocking, but this kind of stuff now happens every day in Mayor DeBlasio’s New York City:

As of Sunday, cops have investigated 49 assaults in transit over the last month — more than double the number of assaults during the same time last year, when few were taking the subway because of the pandemic.
So far this year, 187 assaults have been reported in transit, 45 more than the 142 reported this time last year, police said.

Stay away from New York City. You’d have to be crazy to live there and, as we all know by now, Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Five Mass Shootings This Weekend

Posted on

FAIRFIELD TOWNSHIP, N.J.:

The two people killed at a mass shooting during a party at a New Jersey home late on Saturday night have been identified by authorities.
Asia Hester, 25, and Kevin Elliott, 30, were shot and killed in what witnesses are saying was a gang-related ‘turf war’ that erupted during a house party that was held in a South Jersey suburb about an hour outside of Philadelphia.
Twelve people were wounded in the shooting. No arrests have been made.
Hester’s sister, Crystal, told the New York Post on Sunday that Asia was a ‘hardworking’ health care professional who became an A student after immigrating to the United States from her native Jamaica. . . .
A witness, 44-year-old Sunshine Carter, said there were at least 30 gunshots.
‘I was sitting on a chair talking to my daughter and a friend. We were laughing. Next thing I knew, I hear shots fired, like 20 shots,’ Carter told the Post.
‘Then it stopped, then 10, 15 more.
‘I didn’t know if they had to reload. I didn’t know if it was two shooters, one shooter.
‘I was running for my dear life.’ . . .
One of the women who attended the party said that the shooting was gang-related.
‘It’s South Side young boys vs. North Side young boys,’ said the guest.
‘This has been going on since the ’60s, and now they’re getting crazier with it.
‘They’re bringing guns.’

COLUMBUS, OHIO:

A teenage girl is dead, five other young people were wounded and two others injured in a mass shooting late Saturday night at a music party promoted on social media at the amphitheater in Bicentennial Park in Downtown Columbus.
Police and Columbus Fire medics were called at 11:51 p.m. Saturday to a reported shooting at the park along Scioto Mile and found a chaotic scene with several people wounded.
Olivia Kurtz, 16, was transported to OhioHealth Grant Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 1:06 a.m., police said. Kurtz was a student at Columbus City Schools’ Fort Hayes Arts and AcademHigh School, the district confirmed.
Three females and two males, ranging in age from 15-19, were wounded. The shooting victims were transported to OhioHealth Grant Medical Center, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
A 16-year-old male transported to OSU Wexner underwent surgery and is reported in stable condition. A 15-year-old girl, two 19-year-old women and a 19-year-old man who were shot were all expected to recover from their injuries, police said.

MINNEAPOLIS:

One suspect is in custody and another is dead, after a a mass shooting in downtown Minneapolis Saturday evening, according to a Minneapolis Police Department spokesman.
Jowan Contrail Carroll, 24, is being held at Hennepin County Adult Detention Center, Minneapolis Police Department public information officer, John Elder, told ABC News. There are currently no charges against Carroll; the department has until noon on Tuesday to issue charges, but police are looking at a probable murder charge, Elder said.
Another suspect is dead, he confirmed. That suspect’s identification will not be released until the medical examiner’s office completes its investigation.
Two people are dead, including one of the suspects. Seven received non-life-threatening injuries and one remains in critical condition.
The Minneapolis Police Department said all 10 shooting victims are adults, five male and five female. The two deceased victims are males.
The shooting involved a dispute between two people who both pulled out guns and started shooting at each other, according to Elder.
The incident took place downtown along the 300 block of North 1st Avenue.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C.:

A teenager is dead and 14 people are hurt after a mass shooting during an unauthorized neighborhood event in North Charleston on Saturday, according to North Charleston Police.
A 14-year-old female died of her injuries, police said. . . .
“It’s a sad day that we have to be here today to talk about another death of another young person,” North Charleston Police Chief Reggie Burgess said during the press conference.
Burgess said suspects have not been identified and a motive is not clear, although police suspect it was multiple gunmen that fired shots.
“The individuals were angry at each other and they didn’t care who got hit,” he said. . . .
Authorities said the shooting occurred after a fight broke out near the stage of an unauthorized concert within the neighborhood.

YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO:

Police are investigating a mass shooting outside a bar on Youngtown’s lower west side where three people died and at least three more were wounded just after 2 a.m. Sunday morning.
There were dozens of casings in front of the Torch Club Bar & Grill at Salt Springs Road and Elberen Street as well as a parking lot two doors down, where a house was also struck by gunfire.
There was a four-car accident across the street from the bar that came after shots rang out.
A couple of blocks east, at the corner of Salt Springs Road and Greenwood Street, there was a two-car accident where one person died and another person went to the hospital. . . .
Detectives said there was some sort of argument that broke out in the area near the Torch Club and there was “an exchange of gunfire,” that saw three killed and three others wounded. Police investigated multiple scenes earlier with dozens of casings spread out.
They’re still trying to piece together what happened.

A quick tally of the butcher’s bill: Nine dead, 44 wounded.

Don’t expect to see this on CNN. None of these shootings were perpetrated by Republican voters upset about the election results.




 

Leif Halvorsen: The Only Kind of Mugshot the SJW Media Will Let You See

Posted on

Say hello to Leif Halvorsen, who was convicted for killing of three people in Kentucky “in a drug-fueled shooting rampage” in 1983. In order to fight “systemic racism,” the Social Justice Warriors who run the McClatchy newspaper cartel have developed a policy against publishing mugshots of criminals, because of the negative impact the publication of such mugshots allegedly has on “marginalized communities.”

Our blog buddy Dana Pico of First Street Journal notes that the McClatchy-owned Lexington Herald-Leader is apparently not adhering to company protocols, because they published Halvorsen’s mugshot in a story about convicted murderers in Kentucky who may be eligible for parole under a new state policy. To illustrate that story, the Herald-Leader published the mugshots of Halvorsen and four other convicted murderers who, perhaps not coincidentally, shared a certain trait with him. Can you guess what that trait was? I think you can.

In their company guidelines about publishing mugshots, McClatchy says that under some circumstances, its policy would permit editors to publish mugshots in cases that met certain exceptions:

Is there an urgent threat to the community?
Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

None of those seem to apply to Leif Halvorsen, who is currently 66 years old and serving a life sentence, his original death sentence having been commuted by former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin.

Even while the Herald-Leader had no problem publishing the mugshot of Halvorsen — a geriatric prison inmate who is certainly not now “an urgent threat to the community” — they declined to publish mugshots in such cases as Juanyah Clay, who was reportedly at large and wanted on a murder charge for the shooting of a Lexington man. Certainly, this murder suspect was “an urgent threat to the community” because, as Dana notes, here’s what cops found when they finally caught Clay:

Juanyah Jamar Clay, 19, was arrested and booked at the Lexington-Fayette County Detention Center Tuesday evening after police said he was wanted for the alleged murder of 26-year-old Bryan D. Greene. Greene was found shot to death in January inside his residence at Eastridge Apartments, police said.
Clay was concealing three handguns on him at the time of his arrest, according to an arrest citation. He also had nearly 3.7 ounces of marijuana, more than 10 Percocet pills, cash and a digital scale with him. The officer who filled out Clay’s arrest citation said all the items were indicative of drug trafficking.
According to jail records, Clay faces eight charges: murder, carrying a concealed weapon, giving an officer false identifying information, receiving a stolen gun, tampering with a prison monitoring device, trafficking in less than 8 ounces of marijuana, trafficking in opiates, and violating conditions of release.

A drug dealer with three handguns wanted on a murder warrant, but Juanyah Clay wasn’t deemed “an urgent threat to the community” by the editors of the Herald-Leader? Can you guess why? I think you can.

Obviously, not every local media outlet has surrendered to the kind of SJW mentality that now controls the Lexington Herald-Leader, but as someone who spent more than 20 years in the newspaper business, I must ask this: What happened to “the public’s right to know”?

This was the phrase used by journalists for many decades to defend such controversial decisions as publication of the “Pentagon Papers,” and many other practices. Journalists demanded access to public records (so-called “sunshine laws”) because what government did, in the name of the people, and with taxpayer dollars, ought to be publicly known.

Certainly in matters of law enforcement, the identities of people arrested by police are a matter of public record, as are the mug shots of suspects. No ethical journalist would willingly become complicit in a deliberate effort to conceal such information from the public.

But of course, the unethical SJWs of the McClatchy cartel do not consistently apply their policy of suppressing facts about crime. When Dana emailed me a link to his post, my reply was:

“Leif Halvorsen” might be the whitest name imaginable.
Ah, how low the Nordic ubermenschen have fallen!

That’s the kind of joke Lewis Grizzard might have made back in the day when newspapers hired people who knew how to write, which were also, coincidentally or not, the days when people actually bothered to read newspapers. But those days are gone, and if you want to know who’s committing murder in your community, don’t bother looking at any newspaper owned by the McClatchy cartel, because they won’t tell you.

Unless, of course, the suspect has a name like “Leif Halvorsen.”

Nordic ubermenschen are not yet a “marginalized community.”




 

Democrats: The Party of Hate

Posted on

The national poster child for Racial Derangement Syndrome:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s spokesperson has reportedly announced that she will only give interviews to “Black or Brown” journalists on the occasion of reaching the halfway point in her term as mayor. . . .
Lightfoot, the city’s first black female mayor, and also the first lesbian mayor, has been a target of public criticism for her harsh policies during the coronavirus pandemic, her failure to manage the Black Lives Matter riots, and a sharp rise in crime throughout the already-violent city.

More on Mayor Lightfoot’s journalistic segregation:

“I’m thinking in this one day when we are looking at the two-year anniversary of my inauguration, as a woman of color, as a lesbian, it’s important to me that diversity is put front in center,” Lightfoot said. . . .
“If I as the black woman mayor, the first ever, don’t challenge us, the collective us, to do better, to really make sure that in every institution it reflects the diversity, nuance and texture, the shame on me,” Lightfoot said. . . .
Political analyst Charles Thomas knows the City Hall beat well, as a former television political reporter. He says although newsroom diversity is an important topic, he questions the mayor’s timing.
“This is a distraction,” he said. “Instead of talking about crime, talking about disarray in her administration, talking about education, talking about city finances, we’re talking about this.”

Exactly right. Identity politics is a distraction from government failure. And certainly Mayor Frogface has failed to keep Chicago safe:

Forty-six individuals were shot, five fatally, during another violent weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago.
Breitbart News reported 29 people were shot Friday into Saturday night alone in the Windy City, with five of those shooting victims succumbing to their wounds.
On Sunday morning, two Chicago police officers were shot by an individual who opened fire on them in an alley. The officers were both hospitalized but “stable and recovering,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
By Monday morning at 5:08 a.m., ABC 7 / Chicago Sun-Times noted the total number of overall shooting victims for the weekend had risen to 46. So it was a bloody Sunday.
Among the weekend’s wounded were a two-year-old girl who “was shot in Little Village on the Southwest side” while riding in the backseat of a vehicle.

Little children are being shot in Chicago, and all Mayor Frogface wants to talk about is “diversity,” because Amphibian Lives Matter.




 

God Bless Officer Tatum

Posted on

If you are a God-fearing American, you need to be praying for this man. Brandon Tatum is doing the Lord’s work, and he needs all your prayer circles calling down God’s angels to protect him from evil.

Because I watch a lot of crime videos on YouTube, the algorithm somehow started pushing videos from the Officer Tatum channel into my recommendations, and the first one I watched was like, “Oh, wow, this guy gets it.” He’s saying the same things I’ve been saying about this violent crime wave and BLM and Ben Crump and so forth.

Anyway, he uploaded a video about the shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. For weeks, Crump and the usual suspects have been in the “Family Demand Answers” mode, accusing police (county sheriff’s deputies, actually) of “executing” Brown. “Release the video!” was the main demand, and it was implied, if not stated directly, that there was some kind of cover-up involved. What these “activist” types and their friends in the liberal media didn’t want you to know is, first of all, the laws in North Carolina don’t allow for this kind of stuff to be released publicly without a judge’s authorization, and the judge in this case wanted to wait until the state police and the district attorney had completed their investigation. But if you’re stupid enough to believe the way this story was presented on CNN and MSNBC, you might actually believe that the sheriff’s deputies in Pasquotank County are just a bunch of racist goons who murdered an innocent black man.

My second point: Andrew Brown Jr. was definitely not innocent.

He was never really innocent in his entire adult life. When he got shot dead by deputies serving an arrest warrant, Brown was 42. He had a criminal record dating back as far as 1996. Do the math, and you realize Brown has been a criminal since before he even turned 18.

So far as anyone can tell, Andrew Brown Jr. never had a real job, never earned an honest dollar in his whole life. He was a lifelong drug dealer who was convicted no fewer than 12 times — TWELVE TIMES — of felony drug charges. He was most recently released from prison in 2018. The reason deputies were serving a warrant on him was because an informant got undercover video of Brown dealing drugs. What kind of drugs was he dealing? Meth, cocaine, and heroin laced with fentanyl.

It wasn’t like Brown was just turning over a few nickel bags of weed or something. He was dealing serious amounts of very bad drugs, the kind of stuff that puts people in an early grave, and you can make all the libertarian arguments you want for ending the “War on Drugs,” but do you want this deadly poison being sold in your community?

America answers: “Hell to the no.” We want to put these people in prison, and the sheriff’s department in Pascotank County had an airtight case against Anthony Brown Jr. They had warrants to arrest him and search his property, but they also knew that Brown had previously shown a disposition to resist arrest or attempt to flee, so when they went to serve the warrant, they brought their tactical squad with them.

Now I’m going to insert Officer Tatum’s video, in which he reviews and comments on the body-camera footage of this incident:

 

Let me here say a few words about prejudice.

Because I’m a Southerner, I’ve been dealing with prejudice my whole life. One of the reasons I prefer written communication is because, with the written word, you can’t hear my accent. Like Jeff Foxworthy says, the minute a Southerner opens his mouth, people deduct 15 points from his IQ score — no matter how smart a Southerner may be, the slow-motion drawl makes him sound stupid. And because I’ve got a particularly sharp Appalachian twang, I know I seem more intelligent when I write than when I speak. Having dealt with this problem for decades — a professional journalist who talks like Jed Clampett — I am aware that black people suffer similar problems if they “talk black.”

What do you think Joe Biden meant, really, when he praised Barack Obama as being “clean” and “articulate,” as if possessing such qualities had been hitherto unknown among black Americans? You can say it was racist of Biden to say that, and the last thing I want to do is to defend Joe against accusations of racism, but what he obviously meant was that Obama didn’t “talk black” like, e.g., Jesse Jackson.

Or Maxine Waters or Sheila Jackson Lee or any of the other black Democrats who, by word and deed, reinforce the worst racial stereotypes. I mean, every time “Kerosene Maxine” opens her mouth, it’s like a recruiting ad for the KKK. If you’re looking for the Number One cause of racism in America, look no farther than the 43rd District of California.

All of this I say because Brandon Tatum talks the way you’d expect a black man from Tarrant County, Texas, to talk, and many viewers of his videos — particularly the intellectuals of the journalistic elite — might therefore underestimate his intelligence. Certainly, he’s been dealing with this his whole life, but let me tell you something I know from direct experience: Just because a black person doesn’t speak with the elocution and grammatic accuracy of a Cambridge University professor, don’t assume they’re stupid. Because the joke may be on you.

See, as a professional journalist, I learned to anticipate how my redneck accent caused people to underestimate me, and use that to my advantage — like Detective Columbo playing dumb with a murder suspect, and then waving his cigar: “Ah, I just got one more question . . .”

Call up somebody and give ’em that aw-shucks, yes-ma-am, no-ma’am stuff like you’re just a down-home good ol’ boy — let ’em underestimate you — and you’d be surprised at what folks will tell you. If I can figure out how prejudice can be used as ju-jitsu leverage, I’m sure plenty of black people have figured it out, too, so if you’re underestimating Brandon Tatum because he “talks black,” you need to rethink your assumptions. And speaking of assumptions . . .

Why do so many people — including a lot of liberals — act as if the word black is a synonym for poor? Some white folks encounter a successful black man and will automatically assume he grew up in the ghetto and miraculously escaped a life of poverty. Hate to disillusion anyone, but despite the so-called “income gap” between whites (as a group) and blacks (as a group), there are lots of middle-class black people in America, and not every black child grows up in the ghetto.

Brandon Tatum’s father was a captain in the Fort Worth fire department, and his grandfather’s brother, Jack Tatum, was an All-Pro defensive back for the Oakland Raiders in their Super Bowl glory days. Brandon Tatum went to the University of Arizona on a football scholarship, didn’t get picked in the NFL draft and became a police officer in Tucson. Seven years later, after he went viral speaking out on behalf of Donald Trump, Tatum left the police force and became a full-time commentator.

He’s got 1.6 million YouTube subscribers — an audience about twice the size of CNN’s average daytime viewership. And he’s the real deal.

Everything he says about this Andrew Brown Jr. shooting is what I’d say myself, except I’m a white guy and nobody cares what a white guy says about BLM because it’s racist when we say the common-sense truth about these criminal scumbags who get themselves shot by cops.

Every Christian knows that “the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,” and you know Satan would like nothing better than to devour a righteous man like Brandon Tatum, so I’m asking y’all to get that intercessory prayer going for him.

Lift him up. We need this guy’s voice amplified so loud it makes liberals shut their mouths with all this “systemic racism” nonsense.

Can I get an “amen,” dear brothers?




 

‘Caring, Loving and Charitable … He Got a Kick Out of Pulling Pranks on People’

Posted on

Theodoro Macias Jr., known by the nickname “Lolo,” was only 28 when he died on May 9. His obituary includes these remembrances:

Junior grew up in Longmont and attended schools in the area. He recently worked for a national cell phone network. He was dedicated to his job, and was passionate about serving people. Lolo was a caring, loving and charitable individual. He enjoyed spending time with his friends, and family. He loved to explore the mountains in search of scenic spots to contemplate. He enjoyed working out at the gym, listened to a variety of music genres, attended numerous concerts, and cherished going on long road trips with his friends, always seeking unique adventures and memorable experiences.
He adored his nieces and nephews, frequently bought them toys and video games, spoiling them like no other. He became a kid all over again when playing with them. Junior was extremely playful, he got a kick out of pulling pranks on people, since a young boy all throughout his life, and for this he will be mostly remembered. Not even his grandparents escaped his mischievous tricks. His frequent jokes and sayings will never be forgotten. Lolo was a loving son and brother, an excellent, fun, and best uncle, an amazing cousin, and a real and faithful friend.
He will be deeply missed by his loved ones. We love you Lolo. Forever.

Macias was less fondly remembered by other residents of Colorado Springs, where he committed the worst mass murder in the city’s history:

The man suspected of fatally shooting his girlfriend and five members of her extended family in a Colorado Springs mobile home had a history of jealous, controlling behavior and opened fire at the family’s birthday party in part because he was upset he wasn’t invited to the celebration, police said [May 11].
Investigators believe Teodoro Macias, 28, walked into a mobile home in the 2800 block of Preakness Way shortly after midnight Sunday and shot his girlfriend, 28-year-old Sandra Ibarra-Perez, and the five others in quick succession and in a deliberate manner, Colorado Springs police Lt. Joe Frabbiele said at a news conference Tuesday.
The suspect then killed himself, according to police.
“At the core of this horrendous act is domestic violence,” Chief Vince Niski said. “The suspect… displayed power and control issues. When he wasn’t invited to a family gathering, the suspect responded by opening fire.” . . .
Those killed were identified as Melvin Perez, 30, his wife Mayra Ibarra De Perez, 33; Melvin’s brother, Jose Gutierrez, 21; and the men’s mother, Joana Cruz, 52. Also killed were Mayra’s siblings, Ibarra-Perez and Jose Ibarra, 26.
The suspect and Ibarra-Perez had been dating for about a year, Frabbiele said. While there were no official reports of domestic violence by Macias, Frabbiele said family members told investigators he was jealous, controlling and tried to isolate Ibarra-Perez from her family. Macias and Ibarra-Perez’s family had a conflict a week prior to the shooting at a different gathering, Frabbiele said. . . .
The Mother’s Day mass shooting is one of the deadliest in state history and happened just seven weeks after a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder. It is the deadliest shooting in Colorado Springs history, Mayor John Suthers said. . . .
Nine of 39 people killed in homicides in the city last year died in connection to domestic violence, according to Colorado Springs police statistics. About a third of aggravated assaults in the city in the first three months of 2021 were related to domestic violence.

So domestic violence accounted for 23% of the city’s homicides last year, and this mass shooting was just a domestic violence incident. The weapon Macias used was a 9mm Smith & Wesson pistol, which had been purchased legally by someone else in 2014, and police said they don’t know how Macias obtained the weapon. But it was just an ordinary pistol, not one of those evil “assault weapons” that Democrats want to ban, nor was this mass murder a “hate crime” committed by white supremacists, so there’s no political angle to the story, which is why it disappeared from the national media immediately after it happened. If only Macias had been shot by a cop, rather than committing suicide, maybe the media could have worked some kind of “social justice” angle into their coverage, but as it is, this grisly massacre in Colorado is just “local news,” like most of the 15,000 or so homicides in America annually.

The reason I led with Macias’s obituary — “his mischievous tricks”! — is because every time a black criminal gets shot by police nowadays, we get the “Family Demands Answers” story, where the perp’s grieving relatives hold a televised press conference with the local “civil rights” lawyer. We are expected to sympathize with these people, who tell us what a wonderful person the deceased suspect was.

Family demands answers after police-involved shooting that led to man’s death
— June 5, 2020

Family demands answers after Ohio deputy fatally shoots Black man
— Dec. 7, 2020

Delaware family demands answers after fatal police-involved shooting
— Feb. 5, 2021

Family demands answers after DeKalb man shot, killed by police
— April 14, 2012

Family demands answers and reform after 37-year-old Latoya James was killed in a raid
— May 7, 2021

Those are just a few of the dozens of such headlines in recent months, as the media seems to assume — and expect their audience to believe — that no criminal ever deserved to be shot by police. Some of these cases are more ambiguous than others, but even where the police shooting was indisputably justified (e.g., the Ma’khia Bryant case), the media still promotes the narrative that what happened was somehow the fault of police, rather than a reaction to the suspect’s criminal behavior.

Next time you see one of these “Family Demands Answers” stories, where they’re trying to convince you the deceased criminal was an innocent angel, just keep in mind Teodoro Macias’s obituary.

Oh, “his mischievous tricks”!




 

Times Square Shooting Suspect ‘Career Criminal With a Lengthy Rap Sheet’

Posted on

When you’re on the run, don’t run out of gas:

Farrakhan Muhammad, 31, was arrested in Florida on Wednesday on suspicion of being the man responsible for shooting three people in New York City’s Times Square neighborhood earlier this week.
According to the Associated Press, Muhammad was taken into custody in a McDonald’s parking lot near Jacksonville, Fla. where he was with a woman believed to be his girlfriend.
He was arrested by U.S. Marshals and was listed in an inmate database for the Bradford County Sheriff’s Office, the outlet reports.
Two dogs were also reportedly in the car.
The arrest occurred without incident, according to police.
Initial media reports noted that Muhammad’s girlfriend was not arrested at first but that police were only in the very early stages of their investigation. That girlfriend, Kristen Vergara was, however, later arrested and charged with accessory after the fact.
According to New York City-based Spectrum NY-1, Muhammad was eating in his car at the time he was found out and had only taken refuge in his vehicle (and the fast food chain’s parking lot) because of an East Coast fuel shortage. After running out of gas, the suspect reportedly had no choice but to briefly stop in Starke, Fla.

Coincidentally, Starke is the location of Florida’s main state penitentiary — institutions with which Muhammad should be quite familiar:

The suspected gunman who allegedly wounded three people in Times Square — including a 4-year-old girl — is a career criminal with a lengthy rap sheet, sources familiar with the cases told The Post.
Farrakhan Muhammad, 31 . . . has a criminal record dating to 2007, including two felony robbery arrests and a 2012 bust where cops seized a 12-gauge shotgun, a 22-caliber handgun, and body armor, according to sources.
According to the sources, Muhammad’s first arrest was in January 2007, when he was picked up on a robbery charge for allegedly stealing a victim’s cellphone in Brooklyn.
In November 2009, Muhammad was hit with another robbery charge for allegedly grabbing a woman’s bag while she was loading up a car — with him and a second suspect fleeing the scene, sources said.
His other busts include turnstile jumping and aggravated harassment, the sources said. . . .
In total, Muhammad was arrested at least nine times — most recently on an assault charge on March 14 last year for allegedly grabbing a man by the neck and throwing him into a garbage can at 51st Street and Seventh Avenue, a high-ranking police source said.

Why can’t New York keep people like this behind bars?




 

Falling Down and Falling Apart

Posted on

Last night, for the first time in a long time, I watched the 1993 movie Falling Down on YouTube, and was struck by the final line: “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to.”

William Foster is a guy who believed in the system. He followed the rules, and yet lost everything. His wife divorced him. He lost his job. His wife has a restraining order against him so he’s not even allowed to attend his daughter’s birthday party. The world has ceased to make sense.

Falling Down is a classic — some of the scenes are funny as hell, in a dark way — and what is the message? It’s about incentives.

Why should we play by the rules, if the rules don’t work? What is the incentive to be a good citizen — an honest, hard-working taxpayer — if the system does not reward you for compliance with the rules?

There are two kinds of incentives — the carrots of reward and the sticks of punishment. What has happened to William Foster in Falling Down is that he finds himself being punished (divorce, unemployment and a thousand other tiny humiliations) despite having followed the rules.

We have heard a lot of rhetoric about “social justice” lately, by which liberals mean a redistribution of rewards and punishments in the system, for the benefit of those allegedly suffering oppression. In reality, however, oppression is not neatly distributed according to the identity-politics formulae of the Left. Everybody has their own grievances, and attempts to explain human frustrations by such simplistic labels as “systemic racism” — or “patriarchy” — fail to capture this reality.

The lessons of Falling Down were on my mind as I watched Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue for his Tuesday program:

There are a lot of unprecedented things happening, but not all of them are shocking. For example, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that, once they got their hands on real power, the same lunatics who don’t believe in human biology immediately made a serious mess of our economy. It took them less than six months to do it.
First, they acted like the U.S. dollar had no value. They spent money like they’d just printed it for the occasion, which, needless to say, they had. Predictably, we wound up with frightening levels of inflation, which for the record they still deny exists. But inflation does exist, as you well know if you live here.
Corn prices, to name just one example of a staple commodity that’s now out of control, have risen by 50 percent just since January. But that wasn’t bad enough. The lunatics decided to make it worse. They paid millions of Americans more than they make at work, to stay home and do nothing. To justify doing this, they used the word “COVID” quite a bit, but it had nothing to do with the pandemic. They just wanted to break the system. And so they did. And the rest of us immediately wound up with a bewildering combination of rising unemployment in the middle of a severe labor shortage.
So, at the very same time, we found ourselves with too many workers, and also too few workers. That doesn’t even make sense, but thanks to their policies, that’s now exactly what we have. And then, finally, in case 2021 didn’t remind you enough of a grimmer version of the 1970s, we now have serious gas shortages, in a country that just recently was energy independent. All along the east coast of the country today, people couldn’t fill up their cars. The footage looks like Venezuela.

And so forth. The real point — why it reminded me of Falling Down — is that ordinary citizens are powerless to fix this manmade disaster. The people in charge don’t give a damn about ordinary citizens, because if they did, they wouldn’t have done what they’ve done. We find ourselves in a broken system, where the incentives have gone haywire, and the world has stopped making sense. We’re all like William Foster, stuck in that L.A. traffic jam with a broken air conditioner. Everything seems to be falling apart, and we find ourselves helplessly falling down.

Things are likely to go from bad to worse, and the only question is just how much worse the situation will get. We cannot expect Joe Biden (or the people who are running the government in his name) to experience a sudden insight as to the cause of their failures. There will be no sudden reversal of their “progressive” agenda, and it is far more likely they will just double-down on the bad policies they’ve embraced.

Probably a lot of people aren’t going to be able to cope. We’re going to see more and more people going berserk — seemingly random massacres, “suicide by cop,” acts of domestic terrorism — because what do you expect people to do when the rules don’t work anymore?

“I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to.”