Category Archives: Crime

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“Now, only the best will drive”

In the aftermath of two illegal immigrants causing fatal accidents while driving tractor-trailers, there are a lot of stories, mostly in social media, about increased federal commercial driving regulation enforcement, particularly along Interstate 40 through Oklahoma. Drivers are being tested for the ability to read English, which is mandatory for holders of commercial driver’s licenses (CDL). It’s not just road signs, but the driver must be able to read manifests and the material warning data on potentially hazardous loads.

I’m old enough to remember the publicity when the federal government mandated CDLs to drive certain vehicles. “Now, only the best will drive” was the slogan. At the time, I had what was called a chauffer’s license in Virginia, and I occasionally drove dump trucks. The company for which I worked brought in all of the drivers one Saturday morning, to take the CDL written test, with their road tests grandfathered. I didn’t bother because we had a concrete pour out of the plant in Newport News Shipbuilding, I was doing the quality control work, and I hadn’t driven a truck in a while. I never bothered with getting my CDL because I didn’t really want to drive anyway.

That the fee for the CDL was $40.00, while a regular operator’s license was just $5.00 might have had a little bit to do with it as well.

Now, “only the best will drive” means that commercial drivers have to meet qualifications. They’re getting tested for English proficiency by being asked to read a passage out of a children’s book; it’s not quantum physics. They’re being pulled for wearing flip-flops, when regulations require full shoes while driving, supposedly because sandals can slip off your feet and get caught under the pedals. That one seems silly to me, but it’s still the rule, and virtually every truck has air conditioning these days, so it’s not as though the driver’s feet will get too hot.

I particularly liked this one:

He’d driven trucks for fifteen solid years, mastering every highway curve and weather condition. At a weigh station stop, an officer slid a simple kids’ book across the counter: “Read this.” The words blurred, the sentences tangled; he couldn’t. License gone in an instant. After all those miles, it wasn’t the road that ended his career—it was the system.

Say what? The driver had, allegedly, been driving here for “fifteen solid years” and he still hadn’t mastered enough English to read a passage from The Cat In The Hat?

A lot of the stuff on Facebook pictures drivers who are Sikh or Indian, and there’s no way to tell if the driver pictured is the one who lost his CDL on the spot, but it’s important to know that the story is real, even if the social media picture is possibly faked.

US bars 7,200 truck drivers for failing English tests, Indian-origin truckers hit hard

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the crackdown on October 30. It comes close in the heels of a crash involving an Indian-origin truck driver

Written by Manraj Grewal Sharma | Updated: All Soul’s Day, November 2, 2025 | 03:11 PM IST

More than 7,200 commercial truck drivers have been disqualified across the United States this year after failing mandatory English proficiency tests, in an aggressive enforcement campaign by the US Department of Transportation (DOT) after a series of fatal highway incidents involving Indian-origin drivers.

The North American Punjabi Truckers Association estimates that 130,000–150,000 truck drivers work in the US, coming directly from Punjab and Haryana due to established recruitment networks, and many of them have been impacted.

Announcing the crackdown on October 30, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that 7,248 drivers were declared “out of service”—effectively debarred from driving—in 2025 for failing real-time roadside English Language Proficiency (ELP) checks. The figure, drawn from real-time data in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) national inspection database, marks a dramatic jump from roughly 1,500 such debarment orders until July 2025.

The move comes in the wake of several high-profile accidents, including a devastating pileup on a California highway in October involving an Indian driver accused of killing three Americans. According to Department of Transportation (DOT) sources, the driver, an illegal alien who was able to secure a California Commercial Driver’s License (CDL), failed the English test multiple times before the incident. DOT officials allege that the state’s lax adoption of Trump-era language rules enabled the tragedy, with Secretary Duffy publicly criticizing “sanctuary states” like California for flouting new federal guidance.

In another case earlier in August, Indian national Harjinder Singh was involved in a deadly triple-fatality on the Florida Turnpike despite questionable English language proficiency credentials, according to safety records. Both cases have intensified scrutiny of Commercial Driver’s License issuance practices, especially toward non-domiciled drivers from India and other South Asian countries, a demographic increasingly prominent in US trucking owing to persistent driver shortages.

When trucking companies can pay non-citizen drivers 52¢ a mile and get haulers, many don’t want to pay 75¢ or 80¢ to get a real American citizen who can read Green Eggs and Ham.

And here’s the money line:

The revived rule, 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2), requires all Commercial Driver’s License holders to read and speak English well enough to converse with the public, understand signs, communicate with officials, and maintain accurate reports. Enforcement was relaxed under an Obama administration memo, which since 2016 had discouraged inspectors from removing drivers solely for English language proficiency (ELP) deficiencies. This changed after President Trump’s 2025 executive order and a series of directives by the transportation department mandating immediate debarment for failing English language tests as of June 25, 2025.

In other words, the two fatal accidents reported in the article can be directly traced to the feet of Barack Hussein Obama! It’s not that immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won’t do, but that immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won’t do for 52¢ a mile. And when CDLs are being issued to “non-domiciled” drivers — meaning: drivers with no home address, drivers basically living in their trucks — those “non-domiciled drivers” can afford to work for 52¢ per mile, because they aren’t paying for a house and wife and kids.

It makes me wonder: how many “non-domiciled drivers,” men living in the sleeper cabs of their trucks, having little better to do, are maintaining separate logbooks to conceal how many hours they’re driving?

This is not to say that real American truck drivers don’t have accidents; they absolutely do. If there are any statistics showing a difference in accident rates between citizen and non-citizen drivers, I have not found them. But Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy noted that several states, including California, were improperly issuing CDLs to non-domiciled drivers and was working to get the practice within regulations.

It’s worth noting that the previous Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, whom Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff wanted as her 2024 running mate, but decided against it because he is openly homosexual, and who has aspirations of running for President in 2028, did not take any actions to get unqualified drivers off the roads.

Will this cost consumers? Yes, it will, but perhaps not that much. The difference between 50¢ a mile and 75¢ a mile, over a 1,000-mile delivery — and most are less than 1,000 miles — is an extra $250.00 for the driver, but if he’s hauling 50,000 lb, is only ½¢ a pound. Using some rough measurements, a 53 ft trailer, loaded to the max with toilet paper, not exactly a heavy load, could carry 15,500 rolls of TP, so $250 extra for the driver would add 6.45¢ to the cost of a four-roll pack, over that same 1,000-mile delivery. That, to me, is worth getting unqualified drivers, especially illegal immigrant drivers off the road. When they find that they can’t work anywhere, they’ll eventually head back to India, or Mexico, of from wherever else it is they come.

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Democrisy: the left said that no one is above the law, right up until the law impacted the people they favored.

Our good friends on the left spent much of the Biden Administration years telling us what Senator Dick Durbin did in a tweet pictured to the right, telling us that no one is above the law. Letitia James said the same thing, many times, in her witch hunt against then-former President Trump, yet, today, she’s denying that she has any responsibility as far as her clearly fraudulent mortgage applications are concerned. And one of my favorite columnists, Will Bunch, was appalled, aghast, everything rolled into one that Mr Trump wasn’t thrown in prison and that, upon returning to office, pardoned the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers as well as some police officers, even though the vast majority of them had been punished, having already served their sentences.

Yet somehow, some way, our good friends on the left believe that illegal immigrants are above the law!

How an ICE shake-up will bring Chicago-level terror to Philly

The brutal arrest tactics and stepped-up immigration raids that have roiled Chicago are coming to Philadelphia after an ICE shake-up.

by Will Bunch | Thursday, October 30, 2024 | 1:33 PM EDT

There was sheer terror and panic in the voice of the sobbing woman who dialed 911 in Chicago on the afternoon of Oct. 4. It was a day of utter chaos along Kedzie Street in a heavily Latino neighborhood on the city’s South Side, as federal agents led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brutally arrested brown-skinned residents and clashed with a growing group of protesters.

The woman told the 911 dispatcher that the federal agents swarming her block had just slammed a man to the ground in front of her, according to a recording from the city’s emergency dispatch center obtained by the Talking Points Memo site.

“The agents started beating him up,” the unidentified caller said. “They have rifles and they’re pointing it at people.” She added that the man who was getting pummeled was unarmed, then said, “We have rights, we’re citizens here, please help us.”

If you’ve been following the news out of Chicago this fall, you know this 911 call wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced “Operation Midway Blitz” in the nation’s third-largest city, boosted by a Trump-posted meme promising a hellish “Chipocalypse Now.”

We reported, in September, how the columnist lamented that President Trump wasn’t giving Venezuelan drug smugglers a fair chance to escape and deliver their cargoes to our shores. We noted last June that he was cheering on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, even while admitting that he did “find quite troubling the allegations of domestic abuse that caused Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, to briefly seek a protective order.”

Why then is the distinguished Mr Bunch so upset that President Trump is enforcing our immigration laws? Why isn’t he telling us that no one is above the law, including illegal immigrants?

Mr Bunch’s own newspaper reported, last inauguration day, that there were roughly 47,000 “undocumented immigrants,” to use the left’s mealy-mouth whitewashing of the more correct term, illegal immigrants. We did the math, and calculated that slightly over 3% of the city’s population were there illegally. If 47,000 illegals living in the City of Brotherly Love were sent back to their home countries, of left voluntarily, wouldn’t that help alleviate one of the city’s other problems, a lack of affordable housing, with tens of thousands of housing units becoming vacant?

If Mr Bunch specifically, and the newspaper in general, truly believed that no one is above the law, shouldn’t the Inquirer be advocating that the illegal immigrants take advantage of programs to help them return home, or, if being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, comply peacefully?

No one likes being arrested, and criminals frequently resist or try to get away, but most people have little sympathy for an accused thief or rapist or murderer winds up being rather forcibly arrested if he doesn’t simply surrender. Yet Mr Bunch complains that resisting arrest by ICE doesn’t usually work and has sympathy for those roughed up or even injured while resisting arrest.

And America has watched with shock and awe as ICE and Border Patrol agents have racially profiled and body-slammed Latinos, fired tear gas and painful pepper balls at pastors, journalists, and peaceful protesters, and indicted anyone who stands in their way, even a candidate for Congress.

Yeah, that kind of happens when people are trying to obstruct law enforcement agents in the performance of their duty. Violation of Title 18 USC §372, Conspiracy to impede or injure officer, is a federal offense, a felony which carries a sentence of up to six years in prison.

We get it: the curmudgeonly columnist absotively, posilutely hates President Trump, hates him with a white-hot passion, but should that get in the way of Mr Trump doing the right thing and enforcing our laws? Remember: no one is above the law, as our friends on the left have told us time and again, or at least they did so before November 5, 2024.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy!

It appears that having a father who is a well-paid, high-powered attorney, being a college athlete, and living in a $1.4 million home in Lower Gwynedd Township, Pennsylvania, doesn’t somehow protect you from being an absolute idiot. The trouble is that it has prevented him from paying much of a penalty for his previous crimes.

Lower Gwynedd man charged with attempted murder of a police officer

Officials say Dalton Lee Janiczek, 21, struck a Plymouth Township police officer with his car multiple times before fleeing the scene.

by Denali Sagner | Saturday, October 25, 2025 | 8:25 PM EDT

A Lower Gwynedd man has been charged with the attempted murder of a law enforcement officer after authorities say he struck a Plymouth Township police officer with his car multiple times before fleeing the scene.

Dalton Lee Janiczek, 21, faces multiple felony charges, including attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, aggravated assault, and fleeing or attempting to elude a police officer.

Around 10:19 a.m. on Friday, Janiczek fled in a white Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon from an attempted traffic stop by Springfield Township police officers, according to police. The officers did not pursue but instead broadcast information about the incident to neighboring police departments.

No, of course The Philadelphia Inquirer did not publish the mugshot of the accused; that’s from Patch.com’s Plymouth-Whitemarsh’s local site. But the story caught the attention of London’s Daily Mail as well.

Young Mr Janiczek has apparently racked up a bunch of previous charges.

The suspect lives with his parents, including his high-flying lawyer father Lee Janiczek, at their $1.4 million home in Ambler, Pennsylvania . His father is a partner at Lewis Brisbois LLC, representing corporations and insurance companies with their liability claims. He did not respond for comment when contacted by the Daily Mail. Janiczek is a student at Loyola Marymount University. He’s part of the college rowing team, and previously he was a member of La Salle College High School’s crew team all four years.

The seasoned athlete was named captain senior year, and won multiple awards for his sport during his time in school. Despite his sporting and academic successes, the 21-year-old has wracked up an incredible rap sheet, with 11 criminal charges since 2023. Nearly all of his arrests are connected to reckless driving, including speeding, driving an unregistered vehicle, misusing plate cards, careless driving, driving without a license, and parking illegally.

The Patch.com story stated that Mr Janiczek was driving a Mercedes G Wagon, a luxury vehicle retailing at around $148,000, but, according to the Daily Mail, can cost up to $186,000. The Inquirer story noted that the “Whitpain Township Police Department were ‘familiar with Janiczek’ and his SUV,” though there was no current warrant for his arrest.

Being known to the police is never a good thing, and one wonders how much his father’s money kept him from suffering more serious consequences in the past. Now Mr Janiczek is facing charges for the attempted murder of a police officer, and could wind up spending twenty years in the state penitentiary.

He won’t of course, because his father’s money means a top criminal defense attorney, and almost certainly some form of plea bargain. Fortunately, this is a Montgomery County case, so Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner can’t ‘negotiate’ a completely suspended sentence, but if he is convicted of the crimes for which he has been charged, several years as a guest of the Commonwealth need to be part of the sentence. If he does not do some hard time, young Mr Janiczek will learn the wrong lesson, that his daddy’s money means he will get away with anything.

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Hold them accountable! How many officials' inactions and ineptitude contributed to the murder of Kada Scott?

Communications between Philadelphia law enforcement agencies.

Given that warrants and communications between the courts, the District Attorney’s Office, and the Philadelphia Police Department are done via quill pens and parchment paper, and sent between each other by messengers on foot, it is perfectly understandable that sometimes messages just don’t get delivered in a timely manner. And if the days are cloudy, sometimes it’s difficult for the recipients to read their ledger books clearly by just the light of their oil lamps. All of that makes what happened in the Keon King/Kada Scott case completely understandable!

Months before Kada Scott’s killing, Keon King was wanted for kidnapping his ex, but no one arrested him — even in court

by Ellie Rushing | Thursday, October 23, 2025 | 4:35 PM EDT

A month after Keon King was charged with breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s home and attempting to strangle her, police say, his violence escalated: In January, he returned to her home with a gun, then kidnapped and assaulted her.

A warrant for his arrest was issued days later.

In the weeks that followed, King twice appeared in Philadelphia court and stood before a judge in the initial strangulation case. But no one in the courtroom seemed to know he was wanted for kidnapping.

So both times, King walked out.

Clearly, the city was at fault for relying on messengers on foot, rather than providing a horse on which the messengers could get their pieces of parchment to the right people in a timely manner.

In February, despite the warrant for King’s arrest, prosecutors — seemingly unaware that police said he had recently attacked their key witness — withdrew the burglary and strangulation case when the victim failed to appear in court.

Police did not go to either hearing to take him into custody, and do not appear to have alerted the prosecutor about the new arrest warrant.

The messenger on foot must not have made it to the District Attorney’s Office on time.

And King was not formally charged with the kidnapping until April, when, for reasons that are unclear, he turned himself in.

Turned himself in to whom? Normally, a criminal suspect would have turned himself in at a police station, but reporter Ellie Rushing was not specific about that. But, regardless of where he surrendered, he was out on the streets again twenty days ago.

The shortcomings in those earlier cases came into focus this month after police said King abducted Kada Scott from outside her workplace Oct. 4, then killed her and buried her body in a shallow grave behind an East Germantown school. The death of Scott, 23, of Mount Airy, has unnerved a community and drawn national attention.

Naturally, in his attempt to win re-election, the District Attorney tried to shift blame onto someone else:

District Attorney Larry Krasner has said it was a mistake for prosecutors to withdraw the charges in the alleged kidnapping of King’s ex — and his office has since refiled them. He said the decision not to proceed with the case was made by a young assistant district attorney who was new at handling such prosecutions and who saw the victim’s absence as a fatal flaw, even though there was video evidence of the attack.

Also read: Ben Mannes, “Ideology over justice — How Larry Krasner’s policies failed Kada Scott“

Can we really say that the distinguished Mr Krasner threw a “young assistant district attorney” under the bus, given that there were no buses during the days of quill pens and inkwells?

Or perhaps it was the Republicans who control the state Senate who are to blame, for not funding SEPTA and its buses adequately?

If this “young assistant district attorney . . . was new at handling such prosecutions,” shouldn’t the District Attorney himself, or at least one of his more senior prosecutors have been supervising the “young assistant district attorney”? Shouldn’t someone more senior in that office been teaching him what he ought to do, for what he ought to check? Shouldn’t someone in the District Attorney’s Office other than the “young assistant district attorney” now squished under the wheels of a SEPTA bus he held accountable for his mistakes? Shouldn’t the DA himself bear the responsibility for the “missteps” which put Mr King out on the streets to (allegedly) have kidnapped and murdered Miss Scott?

Kada Scott, victim, and Keon King, alleged murderer. Photos via WPVI TV, because, naturally, the Inquirer would never publish them.

The rest of Miss Rushing’s article details the missteps and miscommunications between the police and prosecutors, something the District Attorney blamed on “their digital information systems (being) decades old.” Really? Microsoft stopped support for Windows XP a couple of decades ago; is the DAO still using that? I was using dispatching systems in the 1990s, the early 1990s, when our Dispatch office was able to send delivery tickets to satellite plants via modems. That was over thirty years ago.

But it needs to be said: if the accusations against Keon King are accurate, then a lot of other people contributed to Miss Scott being murdered. Under Pennsylvania Title 18 §2504(a), “A person is guilty of involuntary manslaughter when as a direct result of the doing of an unlawful act in a reckless or grossly negligent manner, or the doing of a lawful act in a reckless or grossly negligent manner, he causes the death of another person.” Were the inactions of the District Attorney’s Office, including the District Attorney himself grossly negligent?

I’m dreaming, of course: no judge would allow a charge of involuntary manslaughter against a government official for gross neglect of his duty, because such could be turned around against the judge himself. But it’s clear that somebody, a lot of somebodies, need to lose their jobs over this. Mr Krasner himself doesn’t have enough of a sense of shame to resign over this, but he should be overwhelmingly defeated in the upcoming election. Whoever was supposed to supervise the “young assistant district attorney” needs to resign or be fired. Whoever is responsible for communication between the police and prosecutors, at both ends of that, needs to join the unemployment line. Should the Police Commissioner, Kevin Bethel, resign? And whoever is responsible for informing judges of other judges’ cases and acts needs to start tending bar somewhere on South Street.

At least as of this writing, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer have not yet published their endorsement for District Attorney. We can only hope they endorse Pat Dugan and not again support soft-on-crime Larry Krasner.

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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer Our good friends on the left somehow believe the barbarians in our country can become good, civilized men.

I will admit it: I have not always been charitable when it comes to our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, The Philadelphia Inquirer and it’s journolism. No, that’s not a typo: The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

In a story about Sherrilyn Hawkins, who pleaded guilty to starving her 21-year-old disabled son to death, reporter Vinny Vella chose to use terms like “allowing him to waste away to just 59 pounds,” rather than tell readers the direct truth. Mr Vella responded, “I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your reading comprehension, Dana. Keep trying; I know you’ll get it someday.”

We continued our Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — discussion a bit further, but it was the newspaper’s main editorial that really got to me:

Lessons must be learned after criminal justice system fails Kada Scott | Editorial

Hindsight is 20/20, but a series of prosecutorial and judicial miscues may have enabled the young woman’s death.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, October 21, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

The killing of Kada Scott is tragic on many levels, but hopefully, some lessons can be learned to honor her life.

Scott’s death is all the more painful for her family and friends because it could have been prevented. That’s because it appears District Attorney Larry Krasner and the Philadelphia court system failed her.

The man accused of abducting Scott had been previously charged with assaulting an ex-girlfriend twice in the last year, but prosecutors withdrew the charges after the victim did not show up for court.

After Scott’s disappearance, Krasner’s office admitted its handling of the earlier cases was a mistake. If the district attorney’s office had instead prosecuted Keon King, 21, then perhaps Scott, 23, would still be alive.

Kada Scott, victim, and Keon King, alleged murderer. Photos via WPVI TV, because, naturally, the Inquirer would never publish them.

There’s much more at the original, the next few paragraphs detailing the “miscues” which led to Keon King being a free man when he, allegedly, murdered Kada Scott. Then we come to this:

But once again, the victim and her friend refused to cooperate with prosecutors, so the charges were withdrawn in May.

This is not unusual, as victims of domestic violence often live in fear of the perpetrators. Reviewing the period between 2010 and 2020, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that 70% of victims of domestic violence cases failed to appear in Philadelphia’s courts.

A big part of the problem is that the accused are often out on bail and still threatening the victims. In King’s case, after the second set of assault charges, prosecutors requested bail of $1 million, but the magistrate lowered it to $200,000.

The Eighth Amendment prohibits the setting of “excessive bail,” so the magistrate did have to set a bail that Mr King could reasonably meet, something the newspaper reported that he was able to post immediately. But if the magistrate required Mr King to be fitted with a GPS monitor, none of the Inquirer stories I could find on the case mentioned it. An ankle monitor might have at least deterred Mr King, if he actually is the assailant, or provided more evidence to convict him if he was not deterred. Ankle monitors might provide the victims with a little more of a sense of security when their (alleged) assailants are released.

If all of the allegations against Mr King can be proven, he needs to spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars, with no possibility of parole. He is clearly a menace to the decent people of the City of Brotherly Love, and will almost certainly never change.

The Editorial Board said that “Lessons must be learned” from Mr Krasner’s and his minions’ inept handling of this case, but it’s hardly the first time that the District Attorney and his lenient and lax treatment of criminals have been noted. Despite all of the evidence of his lenience, the Editorial Board endorsed him for re-nomination in both 2021 and this year. Though the newspaper has yet to make its endorsement for the general election, I would be stunned if they endorsed moderate Democrat turned Republican Pat Dugan, despite the Board’s knowledge of Mr Krasner’s failures. After all, the Board does love Mr Krasner’s attempts to prosecute and imprison police officers!

There is a lesson to be learned alright, but it isn’t the lesson the Editorial Board would like. The lesson should be that American civilization must be protected and defended, even from those Americans in our cities who choose savagery over civilization. In the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror,” in which Captain Kirk and three others from his crew were transported to a mirror universe in which savagery was the rule of the day, when the transport was finally undone, Mr Spock said that it was far easier for the Captain and crew, civilized people, to play savages than it was for the savages from the alternate universe to behave as civilized men. Our good friends on the left don’t quite seem to have taken that lesson, and somehow believe that the barbarians in our country can become good, civilized men.

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Killadelphia: It’s a good thing that crime is down!

I saw this tweet earlier, but decided to wait to write about it, waiting for The Philadelphia Inquirer, for which I am paying to subscribe, to have more. Sadly, the Inky didn’t have all that much more:

Police are investigating the death of a Philadelphia firefighter as homicide

The 56-year-old man was found dead in the Holmesburg section early Wednesday morning.

by Nate File | Wednesday, October 15, 2025 | 10:43 AM EDT | Updated: 11:08 AM EDT

A Philadelphia firefighter was killed in the city’s Holmesburg section in the early hours of Wednesday morning, police said.

The 56-year-old man was found dead inside a home on the 4700 block of Shelmire Avenue at 4 a.m. after police were called.

A 27-year-old male suspect is in custody, and detectives are investigating the incident as a homicide. The suspect told police when they arrived that there had been a disturbance in the home, but the circumstances of the incident were unclear.

There’s one more paragraph in the story, but it tells us nothing.

But what interested me is something on which I’ve previously written. The homeowners of 4725 Shelmire Avenue were so afraid of thieves and street criminals that they literally put themselves in jail, adding bars to their front porch to keep them out. They aren’t the only ones on the block who’ve done that, as the row house at 4755 Shelmire has the same barred-in porch.

A look at the 4700 block of Shelmire Avenue via Google Maps Streetscapes shows not a run-down row home neighborhood, but a wide street, with homes at least visually decently kept. Many have been modified to close in their porches to create additional interior space. There’s no garbage strewn around — the images were taken just last July — and the Holmesberg section of Northeast Philadelphia is far from the worst section of the city, yet we can still see residents afraid of crime.

Zillow shows the interior details of 4725 Shelmire, so it was obviously on the market recently, and Zillow guesstimates the value of the three bedroom, two bath, 1,280 ft² home to be $211,800. An affordable home in a clean-looking neighborhood in Northeast Philly!

The newspaper reported, just two days ago, that an increasing percentage of Philadelphians are paying more than 35% of their income on rent, a percentage that the Department of Housing and Urban Development considers to be “cost-burdened.” Looks to me that they should be buying on Shelmire .  .  . if they are not too afraid of crime.

 

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl!

Precious Hamilton is only fifteen years old, but she just might spend the next couple of decades in prison. Her initial claims are that it was all an accident, but someone is still stone-cold graveyard dead.

15-year-old girl charged with third-degree murder in fatal shooting of Abington teen

Abington Township police arrested Precious Hamilton in a shooting that killed 17-year-old Baseem “Seyven” Baker

by Jesse Bunch | Tuesday, October 7, 2025 | 5:18 PM EDT

Precious Hamilton, mugshot via Fox 29 News.

Montgomery County prosecutors charged a 15-year-old girl with third-degree murder Tuesday in the shooting death of an Abington teenager in his family’s apartment on Monday afternoon.

Precious Hamilton, of Eddystone, was arrested that evening by Abington Township police in connection with a shooting that left 17-year-old Baseem “Seyven” Baker dead from a gunshot wound to the head, prosecutors said.

No, of course young Miss Hamilton’s mugshot was not published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, but a quick Google search found it for me, from more than one source.

Police arrived at Baker’s apartment on the 100 block of Old York Road to find the teen dead in his bedroom, authorities said.

Police said Hamilton had been staying at the apartment over the weekend and had shown Baker the gun, a small-caliber revolver, on Sunday when “dry firing” the weapon out of Baker’s window, according to videos and a photo recovered from Baker’s iPad.

Though the article does not state it explicitly, reporter Jesse Bunch’s article makes it appear that the gun was Miss Hamilton’s. The charges filed, including possession of a firearm by a minor and carrying a firearm without a license, support that reading. What, I have to ask, was a 15-year-old girl doing carrying a firearm?

Further down:

During an interview with Hamilton and her mother, police said, Hamilton told investigators she shot Baker accidentally after the gun was left in the cocked position from Sunday.

She told investigators she grabbed the revolver while going to pack her belongings, and that while grabbing the weapon in a “rapid fashion,” the gun discharged and struck Baker, who was on the bed and fell to the floor, according to the affidavit of probable cause for Hamilton’s arrest.

Hamilton told investigators she and Baker had previously dated, then maintained a friendship for about a year, according to the affidavit.

I’m surprised that Mr Bunch included that last paragraph. What he did not include in his article, though it ought to be obvious from the fact that the alleged killer’s name was released, is that Miss Hamilton has been charged as an adult.

Young Miss Hamilton has been charged with third-degree Murder, Title 18 §2502(c), which, under Title 18 §1102(d) carries a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison. She has also been charged with Involuntary Manslaughter, which, under Title 18 §2504(b) is a first degree misdemeanor, which under Title 30 §923(a)(7) carries a penalty of a fine of between $1,500 and $10,000, and the possibility of imprisonment for not more than five years.

Mr Bunch should have included that in his story, because there’s a huge difference between third degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. My guess is that young Miss Hamilton will be offered an involuntary manslaughter plea bargain, if there is no evidence that she was carrying a firearm because she was part of a gang. Since this was in Montgomery County, and not Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner can’t simply dismiss the charges. We are no longer surprised when we read about 15-year-old boys carrying firearms; perhaps we shouldn’t be as surprised as we are that some 15-year-old girls are now packing heat.

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That thing that never happens has happened again You in a heap o' trouble, boy!

This is the second time in a row I have used this headline, but according to my WordPress software, the seventh time I’ve used it; there could have been more. I will admit to some surprise, because my source, The Philadelphia Inquirer, told us more than they might have. Then again, the reporter is Vinny Vella, whom I have previously noted might have gotten in trouble with his editors for telling too much of the truth.

A local Montco supervisor has been charged with sexually abusing a boy for years

The abuse allegations come weeks after Nicholas Fountain had been charged with soliciting child pornography in Maryland.

by Vinny Vella | Monday, October 6, 2025 | 9:41 AM EDT

Nicholas Fountain, photo via Channel 10 Philadelphia.

A Skippack Township supervisor, already facing charges of soliciting child pornography, has been charged with sexually abusing a boy who was in his care for several years, investigators said Monday.

Here’s the part that several newspapers, and sadly, law enforcement agencies, hide: the sex of the victim. I have previously admitted that when I see a story written to conceal the sex of the victim, my first instinct is to guess that the sexual abuse was homosexual in nature. Mr Vella did not hide it, and it was even part of the headline.

Nicholas Fountain, 38, was arraigned late Sunday on charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, and related crimes, after investigators say he admitted to the crimes in an interview with Pennsylvania State Police detectives.

He remained in custody, denied bail. It was unclear if he had hired an attorney.

Fountain had been in custody since Sept. 24, when state police troopers arrested him on a warrant issued by the Hartford County Sheriff’s Office in northeast Maryland. He was charged with soliciting nude pictures from an undercover officer posing as a 14-year-old boy.

Naturally, the Inquirer didn’t include the photo of the accused, either in this story or the previous one cited in their article. I suppose it doesn’t matter, because all of the local Philly television news stations had his picture plastered all over their reports. Even Victor Fiorillo of Philadelphia Magazine, who has complained about Steve Keeley and Fox 29 News crime coverage, included Mr Fountain’s photo. Instead, the newspaper used a photo of the Skippack Township office building.

With the charges of seeking child pornography, and since he runs two daycare centers in Pennsylvania, state police detectives decided to see if there was more potential criminal activity by Mr Fountain, and began interviewing:

people close to him about any potential criminal activity, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest in Montgomery County.

In one of those interviews, the victim, now 18, told police Fountain sexually abused him, beginning when he was 9 years old and continuing until he was 16, the affidavit said.

There’s actually a lot to unpack in those two short sentences. While the story does not say so, the first question which came to my mind was: did any of the adults interviewed know of any suspicious activity by Mr Fountain? How did the detectives come to interview an 18-year-old boy? WPVI-TV’s report noted that Mr Fountain is married — yes, to a woman — and has two younger children along with a stepchild.

How, I have to ask, did Mr Fountain, if he is guilty of the charges against him, and he is innocent until proven guilty, manage to conceal all of this for so long? If the victim’s story is accurate, he started this at least nine years ago, when he would have been 31, and somehow left no clues? His wife never picked up on it? None of his friends noticed anything strange about him? A boy who was nine at first, continuing sporadically for seven more years, managed to keep it a secret from his parents and siblings — if he has any — and his friends? Make it make sense, because I certainly can’t understand it.

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That thing that never happens has happened again

Hiring a 48-year-old, 5’7″, 210 lb ‘transgender woman’ to drive a school bus full of young kids? What could possibly go wrong?

Male bus driver who goes by ‘Ms Sharon’ charged with sexually abusing multiple boys

By Alex Oliveira | Sunday, October 5, 2025 | 2:27 PM EDT

A North Carolina school bus driver who calls himself “Ms. Sharon” has been charged with sexually assaulting several boys whom he lured to his house, cops say.

Leetwain Darrell Tate — a 48-year-old a male also known as just “Sharon” — was arrested Tuesday and charged with two counts of statutory rape and six counts of indecent liberties with a minor, according to Charlotte-Mecklenberg police.

He is accused of assaulting at least four boys age 14 and 15 years old, but officials said there could be more victims.

The children were found to be staying at his house, and one of them claimed Tate offered him money in return for sex, an arrest affidavit obtained by WCNC read.

The New York Post noted that the police said none of the ‘incidents’ occurred while Mr Tate was working for the school or on school property.

The WCCB news story doesn’t give us any more information than did the Post. Oddly enough, I was unable to find anything on this story in The New York Times, where they tell readers about All the News That’s Fit to Print.

The Charlotte Observer did report on the story, but of course the newspaper used the feminine pronouns to refer to Mr Tate. The Observer reported this:

In a letter to families about the allegations, Sugar Creek Charter School Superintendent Celeste Sundo said Tate met all of the necessary background requirements to get hired.

“All Sugar Creek Charter School candidates undergo a multi-step hiring process, including a national background check and reference checks, before an offer of employment is made,” Sundo said.

Yeah, that’s what the Des Moines board of education said about Ian Roberts, too, and look how that turned out! Apparently being a 5’7″ ‘transgender woman’ meets the ‘necessary background requirements’ for Mecklenburg County public schools! Normally when you hire crazy, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get crazy.