Category: Wisconsin

. . . well, yeah, mainly it was the collision:

Dashcam video shows the crash that killed a 16-year-old and injured five other teens. It started with a police pursuit on Milwaukee’s northwest side, lasting around 6 minutes.
On June 15, when the crash happened, Milwaukee police said the pursuit ended before the deadly crash. Dashcam video reveals the time between the two was only a few seconds.
Officers first tried to pull over the silver Kia near Mariners Street and North 99th Street. Milwaukee police say the Kia was reported stolen the day before, and the pursuit began because of reckless driving, crossing into oncoming traffic about a minute and a half later on Good Hope Road – reaching speeds over 90. The video shows the Kia performing illegal U-turns multiple times.
The Kia again enters oncoming traffic on 76th Street. About 25 seconds later, the officers were told to cancel the pursuit.
The crash happened mere seconds later, just over 6 minutes after the chase started.
The 16-year-old driver of the Kia died that night at Children’s Wisconsin. He had two 12-year-old passengers who were seriously injured. There were three teens in the white Infiniti that was hit. . . .
An analysis of the Kia estimates the car was going over 100 miles per hour 5 seconds before the crash, slowing down to 65 miles on impact.

 

If you don’t have time to watch the whole seven-minute video now, you can click here to skip to the 6:08 mark where the teenage car thief makes the fatal decision to drive into oncoming traffic. Immediately after this deadly “accident” (a head-on collision isn’t really very accidental when you’re driving in the opposite lane at 100 mph) in June, local media produced the inevitable “Family Demands Answers” story:

The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the 16-year-old boy who died in a horrific crash Tuesday night as Damantae Hambright. Five other young people were injured.
It happened just before 9 p.m. on North 76th Street, near Good Hope Road.
According to the Milwaukee Police Department, officers noticed a stolen Kia Sportage on Good Hope Road and attempted to pull it over. Rather than stopping, the 16-year-old driver, Damantae Hambright, took off. A police chase ensued.
Investigators say Hambright started driving the wrong way — into oncoming traffic — on 76th Street, ultimately crashing head-on into another car (an Infiniti M35).
The occupants of that car — two 18-year-olds and a 19-year-old — all suffered life-threatening injuries, but are stable at Froedtert Hospital.
Two 12-year-old girls who were in the stolen car with Hambright sustained very serious injuries. . . .
Police say none of the occupants in the stolen vehicle were wearing seatbelts.
Hambright’s mother, Pairresh Bond, sent TMJ4 a statement that reads in part, “my only son was a 16-year-old black male in Milwaukee, Wisconsin who made the wrong decision, and who hasn’t at that age? He didn’t deserve to pay with his life. I feel terrible about the whole incident and send my prayers to all involved.”

Excuse me if this seems insensitive to a grieving parent, but are you out of your freaking mind, lady? What kind of bizarre madness has seized hold of people in Milwaukee that stealing a car and driving it 100 mph into oncoming traffic is spoken of as merely the kind of “wrong decision” that anyone might make at age 16? And what does this “wrong decision” have to do with him being a “black male in Milwaukee”? Is the mother of the deceased car thief telling us that people of African descent have some sort of genetic tendency toward grand theft auto and high-speed driving? Or is this just some localized custom, specific to Milwaukee? A coming-of age ritual? Jewish boys get a bar mitzvah, WASP girls do the cotillion, Mexican girls have a quinceañera, and black kids steal cars?

Damantae just “made the wrong decision” when he stole that car. Damantae just “made the wrong decision” when he was riding around on a Tuesday with two 12-year-girls in that stolen car. When Damantae got blue-lighted by the cops, he just “made the wrong decision” to take off at 100 mph, cross the median and go head-on into oncoming traffic.

And why? Because he was a “black male in Milwaukee,” his mom says, as if that explains everything, or as if maybe she expects Ben Crump to show up and make her son a heroic martyr like George Floyd.

As someone who has spent a 35-year career finding the right words to describe all kinds of situations, I confess utter failure here, because there are no words adequate to express such intense stupidity. This astonishingly stupid quote — Damantae “made the the wrong decision, and who hasn’t at that age?” — expresses a pattern of belief and behavior that we might call the Zero Consequences Syndrome.

If people are encouraged to believe that it is unfair for them to suffer negative consequences for harmful behavior, and if social institutions like schools, courts and the news media are all committed to such beliefs, harmful behavior will become commonplace. Many black people apparently now believe that it is wrong for any black person to be arrested or imprisoned for crime, because the justice system is “racist.” And so this belief leads to an increase of harmful behaviors that the criminal justice system is supposed to deter. Mayhem and destruction ensue and when, inevitably, people die as a result, you get quotes like this from idiots who are shocked — shocked! — that somebody has to suffer the consequences of bad behavior. The perpetrator of a serious crime (and auto theft is serious, to say nothing of attempting to elude police at 100 mph) is depicted as a victim, who “didn’t deserve to pay with his life.”

This is where the “social justice” mentality leads. By the logic of BLM, police are always wrong and criminal suspects are always innocent, so long as the suspect is black. No matter what the black suspect has done, police are never justified in attempting to arrest him, and the conclusion of this syllogism is that the black suspect has a “right” to resist arrest or, as in the case of Damantae Hambright, to flee from police at 100 mph in a stolen car, going head-on into oncoming traffic. And the car thief does not “deserve” the consequences of his own felonious behavior.

The stupid acorn never falls far from the stupid oak.

 

Nearly three months ago, I wrote a post about Joseph “JoJo” Rosenbaum, the convicted child molester whose attack on Kyle Rittenhouse precipitated the shootings during the Kenosha riot that left Rosenbaum and another rioter dead, wounded a third rioter, and has Rittenhouse facing murder charges as a result. At that point — just three days after the incident — there was not much background information available. However, in October, while my mind was focused on the presidential campaign, the Washington Post published a very detailed report on who JoJo Rosenbaum was, a report that also included important background on the other dead rioter, Anthony Huber, and details of events preceding the shooting. The Post is to be commended for doing this work, which includes this information:

Joseph Rosenbaum — depressed, homeless and alone . . . had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexual conduct with children when he was 18 and struggled with bipolar disorder. That day, Aug. 25, Rosenbaum was discharged from a Milwaukee hospital following his second suicide attempt in as many months and dumped on the streets of Kenosha. . . .
Hours after he was released from the hospital, Rosenbaum stopped by a pharmacy in Kenosha to pick up medication for his bipolar disorder, only to discover that it had closed early because of the unrest.
He visited his fiancee, who was living in a cheap motel room, but she told him he couldn’t stay the night. She had pressed charges against him a month earlier after a fight in which he knocked her down and bloodied her mouth. If Rosenbaum violated his no-contact order, she warned, he could be sent back to jail. . . .
The weeks leading up to Rosenbaum’s death had been as chaotic as his life. Raised in Texas and Arizona, Rosenbaum met his father only twice and told his mother that he was molested by his alcoholic stepfather “on an almost daily basis,” according to court documents.
When he was 13 his mother was sent to prison for two years, and Rosenbaum was sent off to a group home, where he began using heroin and methamphetamine, according to court documents. By 18, he was in prison for sexual conduct with five preteen boys, the children of people who had taken him in after his mother told him to leave her house, according to a presentencing report. He spent most of the next 14 years behind bars.
Not long after he was released in 2016, he met a woman in Arizona and fathered a child, but the relationship didn’t last. When the woman fled to Kenosha, Rosenbaum chased her. . . .
[In December 2019] he and his new fiancee, whom he met in a Wisconsin hospital, were braving the winter in a tent they had pitched in an overgrown lot behind an abandoned department store. . . .
They spent their days at nearby fast-food restaurants where the staff sometimes gave them free meals. At night Rosenbaum, his fiancee and her cat huddled under piles of blankets. “We lived off of each other’s body heat,” she said.
In the spring, the police confiscated their tent, so they slept for a while behind dumpsters in town. Eventually, the county’s social services department helped them get a room at a cut-rate motel . . .
Aside from one supervised visit, he never saw the child for whom he had moved to Kenosha. In June, he attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. A month later, his fiancee confronted him after finding pornography on his phone. Rosenbaum body-slammed her, according to police, who took him to jail and then released him.
One week later, Rosenbaum called a suicide crisis line. Police found him vomiting and having convulsions outside a McDonald’s. He spent a few days in the hospital followed by a few more days in jail for violating the no-contact order with his former girlfriend. Then he was sent for more treatment to the mental hospital in Milwaukee.
Two hours before he was killed, Rosenbaum left his fiancee’s motel room and caught a bus for downtown, where a second night of protests had erupted.

JoJo was a product of the White Trash American Lifestyle — no dad, no family, no home, prison record, sexual perversion, domestic violence.

He “met his father only twice”? Can you even imagine that? It boggles my mind, almost as much as the claim that Rosenbaum was repeatedly molested as a boy by his “alcoholic stepfather.” You have to figure Rosenbaum’s mother was a loser to make such disastrous choices of male companions. The picture of Rosenbaum’s “chaotic” life is, alas, increasingly common with the breakdown of family life in America. There’s lots of riffraff out there, children of single moms, raised without the security of the kind of stable family life that Christopher Lasch called Haven in a Heartless World. You don’t have to be rich to give your kids that kind of security; you just have to keep your marriage together. But the sensibility that fosters stable marriages — the ability to recognize your own faults and errors, to forgive the faults of others, to refrain from cruelty and selfishness — has been wiped out by the storm of hedonism that has crashed through our culture. Too many people have lost their sense of self-respect and basic decency; they’ve become trash.

Sorry, worthless, lowdown, no-account white trash, sleeping behind a dumpster, then getting a cheap motel room with the help of the local welfare office, but JoJo couldn’t even keep that, because he beat up his girlfriend after she found porn on his phone. Priorities, you see — can’t be doing something useful like looking for a job, because you’re too busy downloading porn on your phone. A real menace to society, this JoJo character, yet I suppose many people will feel sympathy for him because he had a hard life, but whose fault is that? That is to say, there can be no personal responsibility in a culture that treats even convicted child rapists as helpless victims of society. This tale could be taught as a lesson to young people — don’t be white trash, kids — but our culture denies that people have it within their power to avoid the kinds of behavior that result in people living and dying the way JoJo Rosenbaum did.

The Washington Post has now produced a 22-minute video telling the story of what happened in Kenosha. You should watch it.

 

 

After a week of endless disinformation by the anti-Trump media, we are finally getting the truth about Kenosha, Wisconsin. We now know, for example, that Anthony Huber, one of the rioters who was shot to death by Kyle Rittenhouse, was not the saintly hero some in the media have tried to depict. Huber’s criminal record included a 2012 conviction for strangulation and false imprisonment in a domestic abuse incident. We also know that Jacob Blake, whose shooting last Sunday sparked the “mostly peaceful” riots in Kenosha, was wanted on a warrant for sexual assault and violated a protective order by his ex-girlfriend:

The cops involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake — which touched off a fresh wave of angry, anti-police sentiment across the country — were attempting to arrest him for violating a restraining order stemming from an alleged sexual assault, The Post has learned.
Blake, 29, was forbidden from going to the Kenosha home of his alleged victim from the May 3 incident, and police were dispatched Sunday following a 911 call saying he was there.
The responding officers were aware he had an open warrant for felony sexual assault, according to dispatch records and the Kenosha Professional Police Association, which released a statement on the incident on Friday.
That police union statement also claimed that Blake was armed with a knife at the time of the shooting — and had put one cop in a headlock and shrugged off two Taser attempts while resisting arrest.

The details of Blake’s assault of his victim are gross.

The information provided by Kenosha police puts last Sunday’s shooting in a whole new light. Blake was wanted on a felony warrant, he had fought with police when they tried to arrest him, and was apparently trying to get in a van with three kids in the back seat. Should police have let a criminal take those kids hostage? Because that’s what the situation would have been, if Blake had driven off in that van — a fugitive from justice, with three kids as hostages, in a stolen vehicle. That’s something CNN won’t tell you, that Blake had stolen the keys to his victim’s van.

It was a no-win situation for the cops. And yet we saw Kenosha go up in flames because of the media’s 24/7 incitement to riot. Now let’s return to the subject of Anthony Huber. What had happened was that Rittenhouse had shot sex offender Joseph “JoJo” Rosenbaum. We’ll talk more about that later, but here’s how Huber got shot:

A second person who was later identified as Anthony Huber approaches the defendant who is still on the ground, on his back. Huber has a skateboard in his right hand. When Huber reaches the defendant it appears that he is reaching for the defendant’s gun with his left hand as the skateboard makes contact with the defendant’s left shoulder. Huber appears to be trying to pull the gun away from the defendant. The defendant rolls towards his left side and as Huber appears to be trying to grab the gun the gun is pointed at Huber’s body. The defendant then fires one round which can be heard on the video. Huber staggers away, taking several steps, then collapses to the ground. Huber subsequently died from this gunshot wound.

That’s from the police affidavit in the case, which adds:

Dr. Kelley [who performed the autopsy] indicated that Huber had a gunshot wound to his chest that perforated his heart, aorta, pulmonary artery, and right lung.

“Center mass,” I believe is the phrase.

How did this spin so out of control? Well, from the affidavit, it appears that somehow Rittenhouse got separated from his crew, and the mob was chasing him through the streets. The sex offender Rosenbaum chased Rittenhouse across a parking lot, in a scene witnessed by Daily Caller reporter Richard McGinnis, who is quoted in the affidavit:

McGinnis said that according to what he saw the defendant was trying to evade these individuals. McGinnis described the point where the defendant had reached the car. McGinnis described that the defendant had the gun in a low ready position. Meaning that he had the gun raised but pointed downward. The butt of the gun would have been at an angle downwards from the shoulder. McGinnis stated that the defendant brought the gun up. McGinnis stated that he stepped back and he thinks the defendant fired 3 rounds in rapid succession. . . .
McGinnis said that the unarmed guy (Rosenbaum) was trying to get the defendant’s gun. McGinnis demonstrated by extending both of his hands in a quick grabbing motion and did that as a visual on how Rosenbaum tried to reach for the defendant’s gun. Detective Cepress indicates that he asked McGinnis if Rosenbaum had his hands on the gun when the defendant shot. McGinnis said that he definitely made a motion that he was trying to grab the barrel of the gun. McGinnis stated that the defendant pulled it away and then raised it.
McGinnis stated that right as they came together, the defendant fired. McGinnis said that when Rosenbaum was shot, he had leaned in (towards the defendant).

And the affidavit adds:

Dr. Kelley indicated that Rosenbaum had a gunshot wound to the right groin which fractured his pelvis, a gunshot wound to the back which perforated his right lung and liver, a gunshot wound to the left hand, a superficial gunshot wound to his lateral left thigh, and a graze gunshot wound to the right side of his forehead.

Of the five wounds, two were potentially fatal. R.I.P., sex offender.

This video analysis has some interesting commentary:

 

“That’s the ultimate ‘play a stupid game, win a stupid prize.’ You’re running, chasing somebody down. The person you’re chasing has a rifle. What did you expect?”

Exactly. Nobody would have gotten shot had it not been for the aggressive stupidity of convicted sex offender JoJo Rosenbaum. Once he had collected his stupid prize, the rest of the rioting mob decided they should join in on the stupid game of chasing the guy with the rifle.

Amazing marksmanship. Given a sufficient supply of ammunition, Rittenhouse could have wiped out every Antifa thug in Kenosha.

 

If you want to know what happened Tuesday night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, read Shelby Talcott’s eyewitness account at the Daily Caller. Any competent attorney could make the case that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, but that doesn’t mean Rittenhouse isn’t a damned fool.

Seventeen years old, showing up at a scene where riots are expected, carrying an AR-15 — well, I’ve done some foolish things in my life, but that’s one obvious error I’ve managed to avoid. My general game-plan in life is to stay out of prison or the graveyard, two destinations where most would-be tough guys go, usually sooner rather than later.

Richie McGinniss of the Daily Caller actually interviewed Rittenhouse before the “mostly peaceful protest” erupted in chaotic violence:

I interviewed the alleged shooter before the violence started.

Full video coming soon: pic.twitter.com/G3dVOJozN7

— Richie?McG? (@RichieMcGinniss) August 26, 2020

What do you notice about Rittenhouse there? What stands out to me is his endomophic baby-fat physique. He has the narrow-shouldered, pudgy body of a boy who spent most of his youth on the sofa, and probably never played organized team sports. (My childhood coaches would have had that fat boy running laps and wind sprints until he collapsed.) To put it bluntly, the boy looked weak, and weakness invites aggression.

Excuse me for being judgmental like this. Certainly, I am nobody’s idea of a macho badass, but you’re never going to find me in the middle of a riot, or hanging out in a biker bar, or some other similarly dangerous situation where my presence might tend to invite aggression. A skinny guy like me doesn’t survive to become a grandfather if he doesn’t develop the kind of situational awareness that keeps him away from violence.

If you’re headed into the danger zone and a pudgy kid named Kyle wants to roll with your crew? Sorry, boy — this ain’t the place for you.

What’s weird is, the other guys in Kyle’s crew seemed to recognize that he was the weak link in the chain. If you’ll watch this video posted by Julio Rojas, you’ll see the crew being confronted by the increasingly hostile mob. There’s a good look at sex offender Joseph Rosenbaum, in a burgundy T-shirt, at the 0:16 mark of the video:

Rioters are getting into confrontations with armed citizens who are out here to prevent looting and destruction to businesses. pic.twitter.com/f65YkP24kG

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) August 26, 2020

Watch carefully, and at the 0:44 mark, you see Kyle (light green shirt) get grabbed from behind by a member of his crew, who seems angry about Kyle’s behavior and shoves him toward the rear. What was that about? I don’t know, but it seems clear that the guy who grabbed Kyle felt that he was endangering their mission. I suspect that Kyle’s weak, pudgy appearance had attracted the hostile attention of Rosenbaum, who had spent more than a decade in prison, where inmates tend to develop a keen perception for such things. Just three years earlier, Rosenbaum had been an inmate in Arizona, and had shown up for this riot looking for trouble. We should not be surprised that he picked out Kyle as a target.

Being “street smart” involves situational awareness and an ability to spot trouble. Anyone watching that video could see Rosenbaum was looking for an opportunity to get in a fight with someone, and of course, a bully would naturally seek the weakest possible opponent.

Everybody’s analyzing video in an attempt to exonerate Kyle, and a strong case can be made for self-defense, but everybody knows that really he never should have gone to Kenosha. It was a mistake for him even to leave home that night. On the other hand, he did kill two rioters and seriously wound another, so his marksmanship can’t be faulted, but we don’t need to turn our streets into shooting galleries for teenage boys who want to engage in militia cosplay games. Some people are ready to see Civil War II break out in America, but I’m not one of them. Civil War I was a bad enough idea, and I’ve got the hunch that a 21st-century sequel would be even worse. So if you’re the parent of a pudgy teenager, tell him to stay home the next time there’s a riot.

 

 

When 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire during Tuesday night’s riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the first person he shot was Joseph Rosenbaum. The head shot was fatal, and it was quickly learned that Rosenbaum, 36, was a convicted sex offender who earlier in the night had been taunting the armed civilians guarding property against the rioters.

“Shoot me, n–r!” Rosenbaum repeatedly shouted, in a bizarre scene captured on video by Townhall reporter Julio Rosas.

Now that it is confirmed Joseph Rosenbaum was one of the people shot and killed by alleged gunman Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, I filmed him earlier in the night taunting the armed civilians, saying, "Shoot me, n***a." pic.twitter.com/Nn2encm78Y

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) August 27, 2020

Think about what kind of white man would be shouting the n-word during a protest allegedly in support of Black Lives Matter. And then you discover that Rosenbaum served more than 10 years in an Arizona prison after being convicted in 2002 of “sexual conduct with a minor.”

 

By my calculations, Rosenbaum would have been 19 at the time of his sentencing, and his offense must have been quite severe in order for a judge to impose a 10-year sentence and lifetime registry as a sex offender. According to Arizona records, Rosenbaum was repeatedly cited for disciplinary infractions while he was incarcerated; he was twice returned to prison after violating terms of release, and did not finally leave prison until 2017. He was a very bad man, in other words, and it is difficult to find any reason to mourn his death. So then you read this:

According to social media posts from friends and family, Rosenbaum is a Texas native. He moved to Kenosha within the last year.
Rosenbaum was shot in the head, a friend said.
He leaves behind a fiancée and a young daughter.
“May you forever be with the angels and rest easy bro. I love you!” his sister wrote on Facebook.

A “Texas native”? That may be true, but Rosenbaum was in Tucson, Arizona (where it appears his father is an attorney) when he was convicted and sentenced to prison as a sex offender in 2002. Probably his fiancée and friends in Wisconsin had no idea about the Arizona criminal record of the man they knew as “JoJo,” and Rosenbaum may have told them he was from Texas in order to conceal his criminal past.

It was, of course, Andy Ngo who first reported Rosenbaum’s sex offender status, and Ngo further reported that both of the other two rioters shot by Kyle Rittenhouse also had criminal records. Anthony Huber, 26, who attacked Rittenhouse with a skateboard and was fatally shot, “has a criminal history that includes charges of battery & repeat domestic abuse,” Ngo reported. Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, who was seen on video pointing a pistol at Rittenhouse before being wounded in the arm, is “a member of the People’s Revolution Movement,” Ngo reported, and “has a criminal record that includes being intoxicated & armed w/a gun.”

Now, let’s ask what should be an obvious question: What are the odds that a guy opens fire at a mass gathering and all three of the people he shoots turn out to have criminal records? Doesn’t this tell you something about who is engaging in these “mostly peaceful” protests?

Kyle Rittenhouse shot a sex offender , a domestic abuser and an armed communist.
The kid is only 17 and he’s completed half my bucket list.

— The People's Cube ?? (@ThePeoplesCube) August 27, 2020