Say hello to Florida resident Steven Stillwell. According to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, the 42-year-old Stillwell “has an extensive criminal arrest history of 14 felonies, 5 misdemeanors, and 11 re-arrest charges . . . including: multiple burglaries and larcenies, DUI, multiple violations of probation, drug possession, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of a weapon/ammunition by a convicted felon, dealing in stolen property, and fraud.” Stillwell’s lengthy criminal history nearly ended this week, thanks to an armed homeowner:
Detectives with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office responded to the shooting of a man who they said broke into a Lakeland home Tuesday afternoon.
The homeowner told deputies that the man, later identified as 42-year-old Steven Stillwell, forced his way into the residence by throwing a flower pot through a glass door at around 12:50 p.m., according to a news release.
Deputies said Stillwell was shot three times by the homeowner. Stillwell was later taken to a hospital where he was last reported in critical, stable condition, according to the release.
Detectives said they found a shotgun belonging to Stillwell in the backyard of the home, as well as video evidence showing Stillwell approaching the home through the backyard.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said the evidence in the case indicated that Stillwell illegally entered the home, and that the homeowner did the right thing by shooting him.
“The castle doctrine is very clear in Florida law. A person’s home is his refuge,” Judd said in a statement. “The homeowner did exactly what he had a right to do. I commend him for protecting himself and defending his home.”
We presume that, if Stillwell survives his wounds, he will spend a long time in Florida’s prison system. Who says there’s no good news anymore? Merry Christmas!
Ed McGinty is in the news again. The 72-year-old Democrat has made himself obnoxious to his neighbors in The Villages of Florida by riding around in his golf cart plastered with anti-Trump signs.
Last week, McGinty was arrested and charged with stalking after he accosted a woman at the neighborhood swimming pool who was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Joe Biden Sucks.” The details of that incident are less important than what Ed McGinty’s obnoxiousness teaches us about political tribalism. If you’re looking for a way to explain why a grown man would act the way that McGinty does, it was revealed in a Washington Post profile last year which mentioned that McGinty, a retired real estate broker and Philadelphia native, “has always been a Democrat, just like his parents before him.”
In other words, McGinty inherited his partisan loyalty to the Democratic Party and, until he moved to The Villages a few years ago, he had lived inside a bubble where such loyalty was commonplace, especially among Irish Catholics like himself. In 1960, when young Ed was 11, America elected its first Irish Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, who got 68% of the vote in Philadelphia. For the son of an Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia in those days, being a Democrat was as natural — just “the way things were” — as it was for me, growing up in Georgia during the “Solid South” days when there was no Republican Party to speak of in the state. (Kennedy got 69% of the vote in Douglas County, where I was a 1-year-old at the time.) I remained a Democratic Party loyalist until the mid-1990s, when Bill Clinton’s policies (particularly the so-called “assault weapons” ban) drove me out of the party. Probably I was like a lot of my fellow Georgians during that era. We had remained loyal Democrats until Clinton’s presidency convinced us that the party no longer shared our values, and that our loyalty was not reciprocated.
It’s difficult to believe that someone like Ed McGinty, who proudly boasts of his Catholicism and mentions attending Cardinal Dougherty High School, never reconsidered his political loyalty, given how the Democratic Party has gone all-in for abortion since 1972. But recall that he’s from Philadelphia, which went for Obama by 83% in 2008 and 85% in 2012, and which went for Hillary Clinton by 83% in 2016. In communities where partisan affiliation is so one-sided, dissent is seldom heard, and is viewed as disloyalty to the community. This is why, for example, black Republicans are so rare — more than 90% of black people vote Democrat, and a black person who speaks out against the party’s liberal agenda is denounced as a traitorous “Uncle Tom” sellout.
The Villages is in Sumter County, Florida, which is not quite as solidly Republican in the way Philadelphia is solidly Democrat. However, 68% of voters in Sumter County voted to reelect Donald Trump, and probably the percentage was even higher in The Villages, an affluent (and nearly all-white) retirement community. Somehow, Ed McGinty can’t figure out why anyone would vote Republican, so he plasters his golf cart with signs denouncing his Republican neighbors as “racist,” etc.:
“I’m proud that I’m standing up for what’s right,” he said. “There’s never been a doubt in my mind that what I’m doing is right.”
Never a doubt in his mind, you see. That’s what tribalism looks like.
Patrick Rene McDowell is like a “rabid animal,” according to the Florida sheriff whose deputy was fatally shot by the suspect Friday. The manhunt for McDowell is now in its third day.
“This guy is dangerous,” Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper said Saturday. “If you’re in a home and he breaks into your home and you have a gun, blow him out the door cause he’s like a rabid animal. He will kill you with his mindset. What he did to that deputy, was uncalled for, unnecessary and he needs to pay for it.”
An ex-Marine with a drug habit and a criminal record, McDowell was driving a Chrysler minivan with a female passenger about 2:30 a.m. Friday when he was pulled over by Deputy Josh Moyers. McDowell didn’t have a license and gave the deputy a false name. When Moyers learned that the name didn’t match the vehicle’s owner, he asked McDowell to step out, at which point McDowell shot Moyers in the face with a pistol, then shot him again in the back after the deputy hit the ground. McDowell went into a nearby wooded area, and authorities believe he shot a police dog that was tracking him Friday.
“We never know what’s going to happen when we leave home in the morning,” Sheriff Leeper said Saturday. “This was just a traffic stop and it turned out to be a murder of the deputy.”
Nassau County, on the Georgia border north of Jacksonville, Florida, is largely rural, and authorities believe McDowell is still in the area.
McDowell was active duty in the Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009, and was deployed to Iraq. He was in the Marine Reserves until 2013. For a while after he returned from Iraq, McDowell worked as a security guard in the Jacksonville area, but in recent years turned to drugs and crime:
He has previously been arrested for giving a false name to law enforcement and aggravated possession of stolen firearms, according to Nassau County Sheriff’s Office. McDowell was arrested in April 27, 2021 by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office for failure to appear for several charges stemming back to 2019, according to arrest documents. Those charges include possession of cocaine and possession of drug paraphernalia. He was also arrested in September 2018 by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office for driving with a suspended license and attaching a license plate or sticker not assigned. McDowell was arrested in 2019 for forging checks from his grandfather’s account as well. He has a criminal past in Illinois and Indiana too. Charges there range from burglary, to theft, to carrying a handgun without a license and leaving the scene of an accident, as well as driving while intoxicated endangering a person. Some of those charges were reduced or dismissed. . . .
Deputies say Patrick McDowell has previously been [involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment under the Baker Act] and has been noted to suffer from depression, seizures, and PTSD.
Why was this guy out on the street? Less than six months ago, they had him under arrest in Jacksonville, but turned him loose. Now a deputy is dead, and McDowell is being hunted “like a rabid animal.”
You probably recognize the woman on the right in that photo, but who is the woman on the left? That’s Damara Holness, 28, former president of the Broward County (Florida) Democratic Black Caucus. Holness’s father is Broward County commissioner Dale Holness, who is one of several Democrats running for the congressional seat vacated by the death in April of Rep. Alcee Hastings. Dale Holness’s campaign slogan is “Prosperity for All,” and look what his daughter’s doing:
Federal prosecutors have charged 28-year-old Fort Lauderdale, Florida resident Damara Holness with lying on a coronavirus relief loan application and fraudulently obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars intended to help small businesses financially survive the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the information filed [in August] in federal district court in Fort Lauderdale, in June 2020, Holness applied for a $300,000 forgivable, federally-guaranteed Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan on behalf of Holness Consulting, Inc., a Florida company that she owned. It is alleged that to justify the requested loan amount, Holness claimed in the on-line loan application, and through supporting fraudulent payroll tax forms, that her company employed 18 people and spent an average of $120,000 each month on payroll. In fact, Holness Consulting had zero employees and no payroll expenses. A bank in Georgia approved Holness Consulting’s PPP loan application based on the lies and wired $300,000 to the company’s bank account in Florida, says the information.
Once the money hit the bank account in July 2020, Holness spent the next few months creating a paper trail to make it appear as if Holness Consulting had employees and was spending the PPP money on legitimate, approved expenses, it is alleged. According to the information, Holness issued checks from the company bank account made out to others who agreed, for a fee, to help with the fraud. At Holness’ direction, the people receiving the checks would endorse and return them to Holness. Then, Holness would cash the checks at the company’s bank, give a few hundred dollars to the check endorsers, and keep the rest of the cash for herself – about $1,000 per check, says the information.
The PPP program was targeted for billions of dollars in fraud. One estimate is that 15% of the loans, about $76 billion, were fraudulent. Hundreds of people have already been charged, but as Jenny Sugar, assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, recently said, “I think that we are going to be investigating these cases for years to come. “But we’re likely just scratching the surface. I think there’s going to be a lot more fraud uncovered as before.”
Brevard County, Florida, is known as Florida’s “Space Coast” because it is home to Kennedy Space Flight Center at Cape Canaveral. The population is about 600,000 and is 74% white, 10% black and 10% Hispanic. About 25% of the population is retirees. It’s a peaceful and prosperous place, with beautiful beaches that attract many tourists annually.
On Monday, August 30, however, Brevard County was the scene of one of the wildest police shootouts ever caught on camera, when two deputies were ambushed by 38-year-old Paris C. Wilder:
Wilder was a registered Career Offender with 40 previous arrests including 23 felony arrests for charges that included: Robbery with a Firearm, Aggravated Assault with a Weapon, multiple narcotics offenses, Battery of a Law Enforcement Officer, and Attempted First Degree Felony Murder. Wilder was out on bond for two felony drug charges and had two active felony warrants at the time of the incident.
The preliminary investigation has determined that on Monday, August 30th, at approximately 1:00 p.m., a deputy conducted a traffic stop in area of I-95 and SR 192 on a vehicle in which Wilder was a passenger. During the traffic stop, an additional deputy arrived on scene and began assisting with the three adult occupants of the vehicle. When the suspect was asked to exit the vehicle, Wilder immediately opened the door armed with a rifle and began shooting at the deputies. Deputies returned fire in an effort to save their own lives, as well as the lives of others at the scene, which included a 2-month-old infant located in the rear of the suspect vehicle. During the exchange of gunfire, one deputy was shot in the lower leg and sustained a non-life threatening injury. The injured deputy was also attacked by Wilder with multiple strikes to the head with the butt of the rifle. As the attack on the injured deputy continued, the original deputy was able to end the threat by using deadly force and shooting Wilder.
In a Friday press conference where he released dashcam video of the incident, Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey called Wilder “a useless thug” who was “a perfect example of what is wrong with our criminal justice system,” asking: “Why is a thug with this kind of criminal history even given a bond where he can be out on our streets to harm someone else?” A total of 61 shots were fired during the incident. After the suspect’s gun jammed, he used the butt of the rifle to bash the head of Deputy Brian Potters, whose life was saved when Deputy Tyler Thomas was able to gain “a tactical advantage,” as the sheriff said, coming up behind Wilder and emptying his pistol into him:
“Let there be no doubt, this individual got exactly what he deserved,” the sheriff said. “And to those out there that might be foolish enough to ask why we shot him so many times, the answer is simple: evil can never be dead enough.”
Your damned right, Sheriff! Watch the video:
In case any reader was wondering, Sheriff Ivey is a Republican. A career law enforcement official with some 40 years experience, Ivey was first elected sheriff in 2012 with 67% of the vote — 11 points more than Mitt Romney got in Brevard County that year. Ivey was unopposed for reelection in 2016, but in 2020, he was challenged by Alton Edmond, a Democrat criminal defense attorney running on a Black Lives Matter platform. How’d that turn out? Sheriff Ivey won with 66% of the vote, about 9 points better than Trump, who beat Biden 57%-41% in Brevard.
The idea that tough law enforcement is unpopular, that Republicans should be afraid of looking “racist” if they criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, is contradicted by such data. Law-abiding citizens, whatever their race, do not want to live in a community that lets dangerous criminals roam the streets. Most citizens understand the dangers that law-enforcement officials face in their encounters with criminal suspects, and agree with Sheriff Ivey that something must be done to keep violent thugs like Paris Wilder behind bars. When a routine traffic stop turns into an ambush and a shootout, everybody should be cheering for the cops to win. And by “win,” of course I mean, shoot that son of a bitch dead, because truly “evil can never be dead enough.”
Bryan Riley, a 33-year-old Marine Corps veteran, murdered four people — including a grandmother and an infant shot in its mother’s arms — during a bizarre pre-dawn rampage Sunday in Polk County, Florida.
The senseless killing of innocent people that Riley did not know enraged Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, who lamented the fact that the suspect surrendered with his hands up: “It would’ve been nice if he’d have come out with a gun. . . . If he’d have given us the opportunity, we’d have shot him up a lot.” Sheriff Judd hates criminals that much.
Did I mention that this massacre was completely senseless? Because the victims were strangers to Riley. During a Thursday press conference, Sheriff Judd explained that what had happened was this: Riley, who lived 30 miles away from the crime scene, in the Tampa suburb of Brandon, went to a friend’s house to pick up a first aid kit. Riley had been planning to travel to Louisiana to help victims of Hurricane Ida, and this friend — apparently someone Riley knew from his job as a security guard — had offered to donate a first-aid kit to Riley’s effort.
The friend lived near the Lakeland home where the murders happened. Riley goes to the friend’s house, gets the first aid kit, hangs out about 15 or 20 minutes, and leaves about 7:10 p.m. Less than 15 minutes later, there is a 911 call from the Gleason family, reporting an encounter with a suspicious man, who later proved to be Riley.
“When our suspect, Riley, left, he was very angry,” Judd said. “And he was very angry at Justice [Gleason] because he thought Justice had kept him from seeing this child, Amber, that was going to commit suicide.”
Delgado did call 911, and deputies searched the area for the suspicious stranger, but apparently Riley left the area before deputies arrived. Riley went back to Brandon, where he lived with a girlfriend he had been dating for about four years. In the days leading up to the incident, she had become concerned about his behavior, and now there was an argument as Riley told the girlfriend that God had told him to rescue the human trafficking victim “Amber” and she told him, basically, you’re crazy. She went to bed and Riley then began to prepare the “operational plan” for his “mission” — kill everybody and rescue Amber.
Watch the video of Sheriff Judd’s Thursday press conference:
Obviously, the sheriff isn’t buying any insanity defense of Riley, emphasizing the methodical planning he put into this massacre, and the heinous brutality of Riley’s crimes. But the motive for this senseless slaughter was a paranoid delusion about sex-trafficking, with a military veteran who quite clearly was suffering a mental breakdown. Riley’s girlfriend mentioned PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and Riley himself told deputies that he had been using methamphetamine, but the nature of Riley’s homicidal mania is still mysterious.
Riley served in the Marines and was deployed to Iraq (2008) and Afghanistan (2009-2010). He was wounded in Afghanistan and is “classified as a disabled veteran,” according to the sheriff’s office. Any defense attorney would point to this as evidence of PTSD as a contributing factor, but Riley seemed to adjust well to civilian life, working in what is called “executive security” — basically a bodyguard for VIPs — and had obtained numerous certificates for advanced training in that field. Why did he so suddenly come unraveled?
Is it possible that the recent collapse of Afghanistan triggered Riley’s mental breakdown? I just throw that out there, speculating, because based on what Sheriff Judd says Riley’s girlfriend told them, Riley descended into a delusional condition in a matter of weeks or days.
Riley’s condition appears to have been acute, rather than chronic.
Of course, there could be multiple factors contributing to a psychotic breakdown. Stress from work or relationships, the death of a loved one, financial difficulties, etc., but here you have a Marine veteran of Afghanistan whose rapid descent into madness coincided with the chaos surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which seems too much of a coincidence to ignore. But what about the specific content of Riley’s delusion, the belief that this family home near Lakeland was the site of a sex-trafficking ring where he had to rescue “Amber”?
No doubt investigators in Polk County will go through all of Riley’s online activity to discover whether he visited conspiracy theory websites, and I’ll be interested to learn more about the timeline of how Riley went from being a security professional to being a mass murderer. For now, however, there are just a lot of unanswered questions about this, and the only indisputable conclusion is: Crazy People Are Dangerous.
In the comments on Friday morning’s post (“The Dangerous Clichés of ‘Empowerment’”), someone mentioned the phrase “rationalization hamster” as a description of the way women justify bad decisions such as getting a tattoo on your cleavage or dating a convicted felon.
These two examples of bad decisions are not chosen entirely at random, but we’ll get to that part in a few minutes. First, I want to digress to explain my habitual tendency to follow research down weird paths, bringing me to surprising destinations. When I started Googling the phrase “rationalization hamster,” one of the links was to male feminist David Futrelle’s site. So I then spent some time Googling about Futrelle, who once up a time was actually a journalist, a staff writer for Money magazine, but then became obsessed with the “manosphere” and now spends all his time writing about anonymous incels on Reddit. This in turn led me to Futrelle’s review of a book by Laura Bates called The Men Who Hate Women. So then I found an interview with Laura Bates, in which she was asked, “Why as an issue is misogynistic extremism still not being taken seriously?”
I think that there’s a number of reasons. The first is that it’s a relatively emerging threat in terms of mass killings, so people are failing to join the dots and make the connections between them. But I think a big part of it is that misogyny is so normalised in our society that we really struggle to recognise this as something extreme. We are so used to women being murdered by men. One woman is killed on average every three days by a male current or former partner in the UK — that is literally the backdrop to our daily life. So I think we struggle to see these as atrocities and it is a huge blind spot. It’s also because of who often commits these offences — educated white men and so the criminal justice system finds excuses for them. Look at the recent Georgia shooter for example. The police officer giving a press conference explained, ‘He was having a bad day’, after he had massacred eight people including six asian women. The way in which we collectively excuse, condone, normalise and ignore these white men when they commit mass shootings and terror atrocities really hampers us as a society in tackling the problem.
Some of these assertions bothered me. Are we really “so used to women being murdered by men” that we have a “blind spot” toward such crimes? And what about this “every three days” statistic about women in the UK being killed by male partners? The population of the United Kingdom is about 67 million, so if there are about 34 million women in the UK, and if there are about 120 women killed by male partners annually, how many zeroes after the decimal point are needed to express that as a statistical probability of risk? Do the math, see, and you realize that men murdering women isn’t a crime so common as to be “normalized,” rather that such murders are relatively rare. Contrary to Ms. Bates’s claim, we are not “so used to women being murdered by men.” Even in places where murder is astonishingly common (e.g., Chicago), we find that males are disproportionately the victims. Of the 2,660 people shot in Chicago so far this year, 2,158 (81%) were male. Of the 459 who died from gunshot wounds in Chicago, 398 (85%) were male, so that the male-female ratio of victims is nearly 6-to-1. And 83% of the victims were black.
This is another problem with Laura Bates’s claims. Is it really true that these crimes are “often” committed by “educated white men”? I’m pretty sure university graduates aren’t doing most of the drive-by shootings in Chicago, and I don’t believe “educated white men” are disproportionately overrepresented in domestic-violence incidents. Perhaps some sociology student can dig up the actual data on this, but what Laura Bates is doing (and what David Futrelle praises her for doing) is a familiar trick of propaganda: Find a scary-sounding statistic — every three days a woman in the UK is killed by her male partner — and then assert that this represents a social problem (misogyny) which is illustrated by atypical examples, e.g., “incel” Elliot Rodger on a shooting rampage. This tendentious method is then used to argue that we must suppress “hate speech,” because misogyny is causing the mass murder of women.
It should not be necessary to explain why this argument is invalid, but because logic is no longer taught in our schools, I’ll do it anyway. Most obvious is the fact that among the thousands of guys spewing “misogyny” on the Internet — the Reddit creeps with whom David Futrelle is obsessed — certainly more than 90% of them will never commit an act of criminal violence against a woman. Most people who spout offensive nonsense on the Internet are not violent criminals, and the obverse is also true: Most violent criminals don’t spout offensive nonsense on the Internet. That is to say, of the total number of men who commit violence against women in any given year, only the tiniest fraction of a single percentage point of them have ever visited any of the “manosphere” forums that David Futrelle writes about. If you could illustrate this with a Venn diagram, set A representing “Guys Who Hang Out on Manosphere Sites” and set B representing “Men Who Perpetrate Violence Against Women,” the set AB would be so small as to be statistically insignificant.
In a nation of 325 million people, however, statistically rare incidents may happen on a monthly basis. I have previously illustrated this by compiling “The Year in Dog Sex” — at least 11 people were prosecuted for having sex with dogs in 2016. And this explains how easy it is to exaggerate the danger of “incel” murders. No matter how statistically rare these incidents may be, there are certain to be at least a handful of cases that fit within that definition every year, and if these cases get enough publicity from the national media, it can be made to seem as if “incels” represent a dangerous terrorist threat, but the media could do the same thing with bestiality, if it suited their purposes.
So, having made that 1,000-word digression, we now return to the main topic, Joana Peca of St. Petersburg, Florida.
The tattoo on her (remarkably abundant) cleavage could be cited as evidence of Joana Peca’s defective judgment. The “rationalization hamster” must have run itself silly attempting to justify such a choice. And I’m sure that David Futrelle and Laura Bates would accuse me of misogyny merely for calling attention to this, because any criticism of any woman for any reason is always misogyny, according to feminist logic. “Equality” seems to require that women go through life without ever encountering negative feedback, no matter how foolish or harmful their actions may be, so the effect of feminism in public discourse is to make women off-limits to criticism (unless they vote Republican).
The problem with this, you see, is that without feedback — including the kind of feedback that might persuade a woman not to get tattoos on her breasts — all sorts of foolish behavior are likely to proliferate because, without critical feedback, bad judgment tends to become generalized.
Williams has a Pinellas County arrest record that spans about 20 years. He has been arrested in cases ranging from grand theft auto, possession of drugs with intent to sell, robbery and fleeing police. He was most recently arrested on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm in January 2020. The state attorney’s office did not seek a prosecution.
In 2007, Williams was arrested on charges of principle to attempted murder and strong-arm robbery, but those charges were dismissed, court records show.
Now, if you had a daughter, wouldn’t you advise her to avoid associating with anyone who had such an extensive criminal record? Yes, but then again, if she’s got already tattoos on her cleavage . . .
Detectives have identified Benjamin Robert Williams aka “Bambi” (DOB 12/31/1982) as the suspect in Saturday’s (July 31, 2021) shooting death of Joana Peca.
Williams and Peca were involved in a romantic relationship and had a baby together. Peca was holding the infant when Williams shot her multiple times in the face. Her older child was sitting in the backseat during the shooting.
A warrant has been issued for William’s arrest and SPPD is actively searching for him. Crime Stoppers is offering up to $5000 for information that leads to an arrest. Benjamin Williams is deemed to be armed and dangerous.
He is linked to several open homicide investigations.
Peca was found dead in the car, and the children did not suffer any physical injuries, which took place just outside Woodlawn Cemetery.
At the time of the shooting, Peca’s [infant] who she shared with Williams was sitting on her lap while her older child, a 4 year old from another relationship, was in the back seat. The woman was shot multiple times in the face before Williams fled the scene police said in a Facebook release.
‘The children were unharmed but terrified at what had just happened,’ said Sandra Bentil, a spokeswoman for the St. Petersburg Police Department, according to WTVT. . . .
St. Petersburg Police Chief Anthony Holloway told ABC Action News that Williams lured Peca to the cemetery.
‘He called her and asked her to meet him at that location cause she was bringing the children to him to see,’ Holloway said. ‘Once they got to that location that’s when he decided to gun her down.’
“Meet me at the cemetery,” says the career criminal, and what kind of fool would accept this invitation? Alas, a dead fool, one whose “rationalization hamster” was running an endless marathon.
The fugitive killer Benjamin Robert “Bambi” Williams wasn’t spewing misogynistic nonsense on the “manosphere” sites that David Futrelle writes about. He wasn’t an “incel” or one of those “educated white males” that Laura Bates warns about. No, he was merely a regular criminal, “linked to several open homicide investigations,” and maybe he should have been locked up in prison a long time ago, but this is just more violence against women feminists won’t notice, for some reason.
Say hello to Cody Wayne Russell, and pray to God that you never encounter him, because Cody is the pluperfect example of what happens when the criminal justice system fails. There is a judge in Ohio who needs to be removed from the bench. He or she had a chance to send Cody to prison, but instead this dangerous felon was sentenced to probation.
NO MORE MERCY FOR PUNKS LIKE THIS!
Fortunately, Cody is likely to be off the streets for a while now. When last heard from, he was being held without bond in a Florida county jail. If he ever sees the outside of a cell again, it will be too soon.
Last December, not long after he turned 18, Cody was convicted in Montgomery County, Ohio, of assaulting a police officer. Were it up to me, such a felony would mean serious prison time, because assaulting a cop should be considered an attack on the law itself. Such crimes are disrespectful, an expression dangerous antisocial tendencies, and I wish our courts were entrusted to judges who understood the importance of upholding the dignity of society by imposing harsh justice on those who exhibit an attitude of defiance toward the law.
PUT THE FEAR OF GOD IN THESE WORTHLESS PUNKS!
Excuse my angry outbursts, but I just got through watching a YouTube video of the 12-mile police chase through two Florida counties that ended with Cody Russell’s arrest in April. This punk is clearly a menace to public safety, and discovering that he was out on probation when it happened — because of some LIBERAL BLEEDING HEART JUDGE in Ohio — only increased my rage. Judges who go soft on criminals put the public in danger, and this leniency must be stopped.
So (he says, taking a deep breath and trying to get his blood pressure down before suffering an apoplectic stroke) what happened was that Cody, like the vicious criminal he is, stole a black Dodge Durango and then stole the tag from a Toyota Avalon — apparently because in his dimwit criminal mind he imagined that having a stolen tag on a stolen truck would somehow deceive cops — and took off for Florida. In addition to grand theft auto, going to Florida was a violation of the terms of Cody’s parole, which forbade him to leave Ohio without authorization from the court. Cody traveled about 900 miles to reach Sumter County, Florida, where he was spotted near mile marker 322 by Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Eric Kjekstad. At that point, Cody was heading north in the stolen Durango, indicating that he was coming from somewhere further south, perhaps Tampa. Trooper Kjekstad reported:
I observed a black Dodge Durango with an unknown Ohio tag traveling northbound on the outside emergency lane at a high rate of speed passing numerous vehicles. While in the emergency lane, the vehicle was all over the shoulder kicking up numerous debris at nearby motorist[s], causing an immediate hazard to their safety. Due to the Driver’s wanton disregard to the safety of the motorist and reckless nature, I activated my emergency lights and sirens to initiate a traffic stop on the before mentioned vehicle. The vehicle made erratic lane changes into the inside lane accelerating away from my fully marked patrol vehicle with an agency insignia, at which time I initiated a pursuit at approximately 4:27 PM.
You see that Cody might never have attracted law-enforcement attention — despite being a felon on probation, driving a stolen vehicle with a stolen tag — had it not been for his “wanton disregard” for public safety in recklessly zooming up the shoulder of the highway. Now, if you want to watch it, here’s the video of the ensuing chase:
Do you see why that made me so angry? I was hoping to see the trooper do one of those high-speed PIT maneuvers the way they do in Arkansas, where the fleeing felon sometimes dies as a result. (Trooper Tanner Middlecoff fatally rammed Lakita Davis at 126 mph.) But this is Florida, not Arkansas, so Cody unfortunately survived, getting off I-75 at exit 341, making a zigzag through traffic, going north on a two-lane highway, then crashing into a tree while attempting a high-speed left turn.
It took about 10 minutes for Cody to travel 19 miles on I-75, meaning his average speed was more than 100 mph, and at times he was traveling as fast as 115 mph, according to Trooper Kjekstad. If you watch the video, you’ll see how dangerous such speeds are in “moderate” traffic.
WHY IS IT NOT LEGAL TO SHOOT PUNKS LIKE THIS?
Sorry for another angry outburst, but this business of criminals having no fear of law enforcement is the real root of the problem. If it were up to me, cop cars would have laser-sighted, remote-control miniguns mounted on the hood. There would be a trigger mechanism on the steering wheel, and once the computer aiming system had a “lock” on the target — BBRRRRRRR!! — those miniguns would unleash a burst of .50-caliber automatic fire that would destroy the fleeing vehicle.
Most criminals are so stupid, some of them still might try to outrun the cops, but I guarantee you none of them would do it twice.
Being authorized to inflict sudden death on fleeing criminals would do wonders for the morale of America’s law enforcement community, not to mention the benefits to public safety of lowering the recidivism rate to zero. You run from the cops, you die — that would be my policy.
Alas, the Supreme Court in its 1985 decision Tennessee v. Garner didn’t see the benefits of this approach and, even in dissenting from the majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor didn’t seem to endorse my laser-sighted minigun solution to fleeing suspects, so we’re forced to live in a world where criminals lead cops on high-speed chases without fear of .50-caliber fire directed by computer-assisted targeting systems.
Be that as it may, we can start putting criminals behind bars where they belong, instead of turning them loose the way that Ohio judge turned Cody Russell loose, and if I were a citizen of Montgomery County, Ohio, I’d be investigating this case to find out who that judge was, so I could organize an effort to remove them from the bench. Meanwhile, when last heard from, Cody Russell was in the Sumter County Jail, charged with two felonies and four misdemeanors, being held without bond because he violated felony probation. We can certainly hope that Florida authorities will send him for a nice long stay in Starke. By the time he gets out, maybe I’ll have convinced law-enforcement to try my computer-aimed .50-caliber minigun idea, and we’ll see if maybe the Supreme Court wants to repent for its mistake in Tennessee v. Garner.
