Category Archives: Crime

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How not to sell Philadelphia!

I almost ignored this one, but I just can’t: the photo is just too, too funny!

Philly transplants have over $150,000 more to spend on homes than locals — and it’s driving up home prices

The migration of home buyers from more expensive cities to Philadelphia helps drive up prices across the market.

by Michaelle Bond | Thursday, August 4, 2022

For-sale sign outside a home in the Frankford section of Philadelphia in December 2021. The average person moving into Philadelphia has more money to spend on a house than a Philadelphian does, according to a Redfin analysis. | Alejandro A Alverez, Philadelphia Inquirer staff photographer. Click to enlarge.

Philadelphia may be an affordable big city compared to others on the East Coast and across the country — a draw for new residents — but that’s little comfort to locals who have watched prices rise.In the first half of 2022, people looking to move into Philadelphia searched for houses with a maximum price of $588,000 on average, according to the online brokerage Redfin’s analysis of searches on its website. Locals capped their searches much lower at $422,000.

As home prices continue to climb, people moving largely from more expensive cities have an advantage with an average of 39% more to spend. That, in turn, helps push up prices across the market.

There’s much more at the original.

I do not normally reproduce photos from The Philadelphia Inquirer, but this one struck me as hysterically funny. A reasonably well-researched article about how prices in Philly are lower than in places like New York City and the left coast, the Inky illustrated it with a photo of a home for sale, in which the property owners had effectively put themselves in jail, installing metal bars and a door on the front porch of their rowhome in the Frankford neighborhood, to keep the bad guys out of their property. I have noted this in some bad Philadelphia areas several times.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 16, 2021. Click to enlarge.

In an article noting that there are 57 city blocks where 10 or more people have been shot since 2015, the Inquirer included a graph showing the Kensington area as the worst, Frankford is also included as a not-so-great place. I do not know if the article author, Michaelle Bond, “an urbanism writer covering how people live in their homes, how the market directs choices, and how policies shape communities,” is the one who selected the photo with the article, but whoever picked it could not have done a much better job of turning off people on the idea of moving to the City of Brotherly Love.

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There is no cure for pedophilia If convicted, this fine gentleman should never see the outside of prison again

There is no cure for pedophilia, and any sentence less than life imprisonment simply means that a convicted pedophile will offend again.

Previous offender charged with dozens of sex crime offenses in Lexington, records show

by Christopher Leach | Thursday, August 4, 2022 | 8:24 AM EDT

William Wehking, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

A registered sex offender in Lexington was booked into the Fayette County Detention Center Wednesday afternoon on dozens of charges related to sexual activity with a minor, according to court and jail records.William Wehking, 35, has been charged with 25 counts of possessing matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor and one count of distributing obscene matter to minors, use of a minor in a sexual performance and procuring or promoting the use of a minor in a sexual performance, according to jail records. He’s being held on a $50,000 bond.

Under the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal did not publish the suspect’s mugshot, but, at The First Street Journal we most certainly do. The suspect’s mugshot is a public record available from the Fayette County Detention Center, from which I obtained it.

According to his arrest citation, Wehking knowingly engaged in sexual conversations with a 12-year-old girl. The Lexington Police Department became aware of the activity after being tipped off by the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois, where the victim resides.

Wehking and the victim communicated over Snapchat and text messaging, according to court documents. Investigators got a search warrant for his cell phone and found 25 images and/or videos of minors under the age of 12 engaging in sexual activity. Wehking admitted to the illegal behavior as well as exposing his genitals to the victim in a video chat, according court documents.

Read more here.

Mr Wehking was already on the sex offender registry, non-compliantly due to an unverified address, for a conviction for sexual abuse in Illinois; that victim was 16 years old.

According to the suspect data from the Fayette County Detention Center, the 5’8″, 257 lb Mr Wehking is charged with

  • KRS §531.335 Possession or viewing of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor under 12 years of age, 25 counts, a Class C felony
  • KRS §531.030 Distribution of obscene matter to minors, first offense, 1 count, a Class A misdemeanor
  • KRS §531.320 Promoting a sexual performance by a minor, 1 count, a Class B felony
  • KRS §531.310 Use of a minor in a sexual performance, 1 count, a Class B felony

Under KRS §532.060:

  • the sentence for a Class B felony is not less than ten (10) years nor more than twenty (20) years imprisonment
  • the sentence for a Class C felony is not less than five (5) years nor more than ten (10) years imprisonment

Under KRS §532.090:

  • the sentence for a Class A misdemeanor is imprisonment for a term not to exceed twelve (12) months.

According to my precise calculations, the distinguished Mr Wehking is facing up to 291 years in the state penitentiary, and, if convicted on all counts, that’s exactly the sentence he should receive. Lock him up, and throw away the key!

Of course, that’s unlikely to happen, isn’t it? If convicted on all charges, Mr Wehking could get as little as 10 years in prison, the minimum of the Class B felonies, and be sentenced to have all sentences run concurrently rather than consecutively. The Herald-Leader noted how Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn has been using “mediation” to secure plea bargains:

From murder to manslaughter: How felony mediation works to reduce backlogged caseload

By Taylor Six | July 18, 2022 | 1:00 PM EDT

While the resolution of some recent Fayette County homicide cases has taken years, the new use of mediation in Fayette County has allowed some cases to move much quicker, including the case of a 27-year-old man who has admitted guilt in a deadly shooting that happened just over one year ago.

Danzell Cruse was originally charged with murder, possessing a handgun as a convicted felon and being a persistent felony offender following the shooting of 38-year-old Jocko Green in a parking lot outside of an apartment complex in July 2021.

After Cruse’s defense and prosecutors came together to mediate the case with a retired judge, Cruse pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter. He will be sentenced in August.

Felony mediations were only recently introduced and encouraged in Fayette County in April 2021 by Kentucky Supreme Court Judge John Minton, in efforts to reduce a backlog in criminal cases caused by COVID-19. The pandemic significantly slowed down the progress on the courts system.

Since that time, Fayette Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn said there have been 25 mediations, 19 of which involved murder charges.

Under KRS §507.020, murder is a capital offense. Under KRS §532.030, the sentence for a capital offense is either:

  • death
  • imprisonment for life without benefit of probation or parole
  • imprisonment for life without benefit of probation or parole until he has served a minimum of twenty-five (25) years of his sentence
  • imprisonment for a term of not less than twenty (20) years nor more than fifty (50) years

Simply put, the Commonwealth’s Attorney could have put those 19 killers away for the rest of their miserable lives, or until they were so elderly that they were little risk to society if they ever got out.

  • KRS §507.030 Manslaughter in the first degree is a Class B felony, which, as noted above, carries a sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison.
  • KRS §507.040 Manslaughter in the second degree is a Class C felony, the sentence for which is 5 to 10 years behind bars.

In other words, the Commonwealth’s Attorney negotiated plea bargains which sets the maximum sentence at what the absolute minimum sentence for murder would be. But those murderers manslaughterers weren’t usually getting that twenty year maximum sentence:

There are more such examples, but the point is obvious: if Miss Red Corn is willing to let murderers plead down to manslaughter, and have a chance to get out of prison while still relatively young, can we really expect her to treat Mr Wehking seriously? And if Mr Wehking is allowed to plead down and get a light sentence, can we hold Miss Red Corn accountable if he reoffends?

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Killadelphia Black lives don't matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer

We noted, just yesterday, that Philadelphia, which as recently as June 30th, had been 14 homicides short of the same-day number in 2021, 257 versus 271, the year the City of Brotherly Love set its all-time homicide record of 562, but had caught up and passed the daily number by one murder.

Of course, being just one above 2021’s numbers means that just a couple of bloodless days could allow the killing rate to, once again, drop below 2021. At least for now, that isn’t what happened.

July ended with this year’s numbers closing in on 2021’s, but not quite there, with 317 vs 319 homicides, just a 0.627% decline, not statistically significant, but at least significant in that two fewer Philadelphians had spilled their life’s blood out in the city’s mean streets.

We pointed out yesterday that the nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, which I will admit to having mockingly called The Philadelphia Enquirer,[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. had made no mention at all, at least not that I could find on the website’s main page or crime page, that the ‘trend lines’ had crossed, but that has changed now . . . sort of.

3 men killed, 2 others wounded in separate Philly shootings

The fatal shootings occurred in East Frankford, Germantown, and Kensington, police said.

by Robert Moran | Wednesday, August 3, 2022

Three men were killed and two others were wounded in separate shootings Wednesday night across Philadelphia, police said.

Shortly before 9:45 p.m. in East Frankford, an unidentified man was shot in the head while driving a Nissan sedan in the area of Josephine and Gillingham Streets, said Inspector D.F. Pace.

The Nissan crashed into a utility pole at a high rate of speed, Pace said. The victim, who appeared to be in his 20s, was pronounced dead at the scene by medics.

The victim was still wearing his seat belt and the tires of the crashed Nissan were still spinning and eventually disintegrated, Pace said.

A witness told police a man stumbled out of the sedan after the crash and fled in an unknown direction, Pace said.

A spent shell casing was found inside the vehicle and a gun was found under the car, Pace said.

Just before 6:50 p.m. in Germantown, a 28-year-old man was on the 200 block of Zeralda Street when he was shot in the head and torso, said Chief Inspector Scott Small.

The man, who had previously lived on the block, was taken by police to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 8:04 p.m., Small said.

The reporter, Robert Moran, really needs to work on his writing; too many short, one or two sentence paragraphs! They need to be combined a bit, to look more polished. As usual, Mr Moran, following what I have inferred to be the Inquirer’s guidelines, deleted all references to race when it came to the victims, but, according to the city’s shooting victims database, all three were black males.

There’s more at the original, descriptions of the other killings, which you can read if you follow the link embedded in the cited article’s title. But Mr Moran’s concluding paragraph was all that I could find about the city’s homicide numbers surpassing 2021’s:

As of late Tuesday night, the city officially reported 322 homicides so far this year — one more than the same period in 2021, which ended with Philadelphia suffering an all-time record 562 homicides.

In other words, piffle! Nothing serious there at all.

The shootings victims database tells us that there have been twenty reported shootings in the city in just the first three days of August, with seven fatalities: five black males, one black female, and one Hispanic white male. Of the total of twenty shooting victims, one was a black female, three Hispanic white males, and sixteen black males. The Enquirer Inquirer, that proudly anti-racist news organization for which #BlackLivesMatter doesn’t believe that that is news which should be reported.

There are times in which I worry that I have reported on this subject too much, and this is the 46th article on this website entitled Killadelphia; “broken recordism” really isn’t a good look. But when we have the city’s newspaper of record trying to hide the records, when the city’s mayor, James Kenney, a Democrat in an unbroken string of Democrats 70 years long and who is tried, worn out, and clueless, when the district attorney is a defense attorney rather than a prosecutor and won’t lock up the bad guys, and the police commissioner a left coast stooge who can’t attract recruits and has left the department seriously undermanned, I can’t help but to harp on this subject, because it is far-left #woke policy put into governing force, on what should be a national stage, and the results should be shouted to everyone: this is the result of liberal policies.

One thing Philly has accomplished is to make painfully clear that, despite their protestations, black lives don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter if telling the truth about how they are being wasted in the city’s streets daily might threaten leftist policies. The idea that conservative policies might make a positive difference is so appalling, is just plain anathema, to the left that they’d rather see blood, red blood mostly from black bodies, running in the city’s streets than to try something different.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Killadelphia! Philly is now ahead of last year's record pace, but the Inquirer hasn't noticed.

This is no surprise; we all knew it was coming. With three homicides in the City of Brotherly Love yesterday, Philadelphia has now moved slightly ahead of the pace of murders in 2021, the year which set the city’s annual record of 562.

This is something that you would think that The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, would have noticed, but at least as of 12:57 PM EDT, there is nothing on either the newspaper’s website main page or separate crime page. Nighttime reporter Robert Moran noticed two of the killings, but was apparently working solely from Philadelphia Police Department press releases:

2 dead in separate Philly shootings

A 29-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man were gunned down Tuesday night.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, August 2, 2022

A 29-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man were fatally wounded in separate shootings Tuesday night in Philadelphia, police said.

Just before 8:15 p.m., the woman was outside on the 1800 block of Harrison Street in East Frankford when she was shot once in the left side of her back. Police rushed her to Temple University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 8:33.

Around 7:30 p.m., the man was outside on the 5400 block of Pearl Street in West Philadelphia when he was shot several times in the chest, police said. He was taken by private vehicle to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 7:44.

Police reported no immediate arrests or other details in either case.

So far this year, there were 319 homicides in Philadelphia as of late Monday night. There were 321 for the same time last year, which the city ended with an all-time record 562 homicides.

So, Mr Moran did notice that the city was very possibly approaching tying or exceeding last year’s homicide totals. Possibly he didn’t have access to last year’s totals for August 2nd, and didn’t realize that two homicides would tie it. And possibly he didn’t have the information that not two, but three separate homicides had occurred, all by gunfire, but Fox 29’s Steve Keeley had. Mr Moran did have the police press releases on the two homicides he listed, but, following the Inquirer’s guidelines,[1]I do not have a copy of those guidelines, but have inferred that they exist due to the constant scrubbing of references to race in the Inquirer’s reporting, something which was not the case in … Continue reading he scrubbed the race of the police reports of both the slain woman and man.

Such is the journolism[2]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 … Continue reading of what I have occasionally called The Philadelphia Enquirer.[3]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. I have twice noted begging letters from the Lenfest Institute, which owns the Inky, asking for donations from subscribers above and beyond their subscriptions. Perhaps if the Inquirer’s reporting matched their history, I’d send something.

References

References
↑1 I do not have a copy of those guidelines, but have inferred that they exist due to the constant scrubbing of references to race in the Inquirer’s reporting, something which was not the case in previous years. And race is not the only thing that the Inky censors.
↑2 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.
↑3 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Killadelphia A neighborhood already behind bars

Going the other way, on the 3900 block of North Fairhill Street, the rowhouses are built right up against the sidewalks, with no front porches on which to place bars. Can anyone really be surprised about this?

What better example could there be for the need for ‘broken windows’ policing?

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Killadelphia Sixty killings in Philly in July, but hey, the real problem is monkeypox!

According to the Philadelphia Police Department, there have been 317 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 31st. With a recorded 257 murders as of the end of June, that means that 60 dead bodies littered Philly’s mean streets just in July, topping the 48 killed in June and 54 murdered in May, making July the city’s deadliest month so far.

But there’s more. We had previously noted that, in 2021, there had been a decrease in the homicide rate in Philly, beginning July 9th. July 2021 saw 48 murders in the city.

As of June 30th, there had been 257 homicides in the city, 5.17% fewer than the 271 on the same day in 2021. At the end of July, those 317 homicides are only 0.63% fewer than the 319 last year. At least so far, last year’s ‘lull’ has not shown up. Rather, it seems as though the gang-bangers and wannabes are trying to make up for lost time.

As of the end of July in 2021, there had been 1,356 recorded shootings in Philly; compared to 1388 this year.

Philadelphia is not a monolith. Heavily segregated, much of the violence has been restricted to five dozen blocks. As Robert Stacy McCain has noted, not all neighborhoods are created equal, and if you’re white and live in Rittenhouse Square or Society Hill, you don’t have nearly as much about which to worry.

But, hey, the real problem is Monkeypox!

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And here you have all of the information that you need to understand the violence in Philadelphia!

I hadn’t expected this, though I suppose that I should have.

We have previously noted the murder of 73-year-old James “Simmie” Lambert by a group of Philadelphia teens and even younger brats. What I didn’t mention on this site was that the 13-year-old girl who was questioned but not arrested was herself shot in a not very nice neighborhood, the 5800 block of Osceola Street.

Well, it seems like the ‘hood doesn’t like that some of the kids who beat Mr Lambert to death have been criminally charged:

Family of 73-year-old man fatally beaten with traffic cone says they’re being harassed, judge issues stay away order

On three occasions in the last two weeks, a group of kids has gathered outside the home of the 84-year-old sister of James Lambert Jr.

by Ellie Rushing | Wednesday, July 27, 2022

The family of the 73-year-old man who was fatally beaten by teens with a traffic cone last month said they have been harassed and taunted by kids showing up outside their house in recent weeks.

On three occasions in the last two weeks, a group of kids has gathered outside the home of the 84-year-old sister of James Lambert Jr., who died last month after two teens hit him multiple times with a traffic cone.

Tania Stephens, Lambert’s niece, said the kids stood outside her mother’s Strawberry Mansion house, pointing and laughing, making the family feel intimidated and harassed.

In response, Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Joffie C. Pittman III on Tuesday approved a stay-away order requested by the District Attorney’s Office, ordering all defendants, their families, and any third parties related to them to stand down or face arrest.

Yeah, that’s going to make a difference!

According to Lonny Fish, the lawyer representing Gamara Mosley, one of the two 14-year-olds charged with third-degree murder in the case, some of the girls photographed outside the home are believed to be sisters of a 13-year-old girl who was present during the incident, but was not charged with any crimes. It is their understanding, Fish said, that the kids had been on their way to the pool nearby and stopped by the house spontaneously.

Would that be the same 13-year-old girl who was shot on Osceola Street? Osceola Street is about four miles from the Strawberry Mansion section of Philly, and a bit more than five miles from Cecil B Moore and 21st Street, where Mr Lambert was murdered.

Makes me wonder: were any of these girls on the way to the pool the same girls whose violence and vandalism caused the city to close the pool at McVeigh Recreation Center for the summer? Granted, it’s about 3 miles from McVeigh to Strawberry Mansion, but certainly not a distance that healthy teenaged girls couldn’t walk.

The girls were friends of Mosley’s up until her arrest, he said, but Mosley’s family has nothing to do with the visits to Lambert’s relatives’ home, which he called “indefensible” and wrong.

“My client is 14, and she’s incarcerated right now,” Fish said. “Whatever it is, it’s not at the behest of any of the people supervising my client.”

It may well be that young Miss Mosley and her family had nothing to do with the harassment of the Lambert family, because they’d certainly be stupid to do anything like this and jeopardize the inevitable request by her mouthpiece to transfer the charges to the juvenile justice system. Then again, there’s not a lot of evidence that there’s much intelligence in a family that let Miss Mosley out playing in the streets at 2:30 in the morning.

Some of my Philly friends are just shaking their heads at the violence happening in the City of Brotherly Love, but the story from The Philadelphia Inquirer really tells you all that you need to know: too many people are on the side of the criminals and juvenile delinquents! That’s how District Attorney Larry Krasner, who’d rather keep the bad guys on the streets than behind bars, got elected and then re-elected, and that’s how he’ll get re-elected again in 2025 if he chooses to run again.

Philly has more than just bad adults; the city has horrible mothers and fathers — if the fathers are even around — rearing children who are delinquents because they want to be delinquents, because they think it’s just so cool to be gangsters and wannabes. No government programs will ever help when the kids are subjected to rotten parents from the beginning.

I have told everybody what is needed to solve the city’s problems, but it’s just way, way, way too politically incorrect for anyone to consider.

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It’s not just the killings; Philadelphia has become virtually uncivilized

Sometimes things strike me as just pegging the Irony Meter. The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Editorial Board of which endorsed District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner for re-election, uncritically published a story about some Philly day campers receiving training about how to stop blood loss from people who’ve been shot in the city’s mean streets:

Sign of the times: At this Philly day camp, teens learned “stop the bleed” training for gunshot victims

With gun violence rising in Philadelphia, 50 city youth got practical training and stop-the-bleed kits at a one-day camp.

by Kristen A Graham | Friday, July 22, 2022 | 4:58 PM EDT

Alyssa Heiser hopes she never has to use the things she learned Friday, but she’ll sleep a little better knowing she’s prepared.

If someone gets shot, the 17-year-old said, she’ll remember the stop-the-bleed steps she picked at a one-day camp held at Ben Franklin High School on Friday: Call 911, apply pressure with hands, pack the wound and press down, and apply a tourniquet.

“I’m in a neighborhood where robberies, shootings, murders happen all the time,” said Heiser, who lives in Frankford. “Little kids are getting shot, people just out watching fireworks are getting shot. The way things in our city are happening, we all need this.”

Heiser and about 50 other youths participated in a gun-violence prevention and de-escalation day camp sponsored by Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity in conjunction with the Philadelphia Police Department.

The idea sprung from work that Christopher Stith, the fraternity’s regional director of social action, had been doing. During a Phi Beta Sigma town hall on gun violence held earlier this year, most of the talk centered on the way violence effects young people.; Stith had developed the “Sigma Self-Defense Series,” lessons in de-escalation and self protection.

There’s more at the original.

There were 315 homicides in Philly in 2017, the year in which Mr Krasner campaigned for, and won, the office of District Attorney. In his first year in office, that rose to 353, then 356, then 499, and in 2021, set the city’s all-time record of 562. So far this year, the City of Brotherly Love is seeing an average of 1.5149 murders per day, a pace which, if maintained, would see 553 murders in 2022, fewer than last year, but well ahead of the 500 homicides in second place, a record set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

Of course, it’s not just homicides. Somehow, the Philadelphia Police Department got the homicide numbers wrong for this year, which is dumb because the source for this document is the same one which reported 297 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 17th, and had 304 listed for the same date in 2021.

More, it shows a 6.64% increase, from 2,199 to 2,345, in shooting “incidents”, and 4.56% increase in shooting victims, from 1,249 to 1,306. I suppose that the difference between 2,345 and 1,306 means that there have been 1,039 reports of shootings in which no one was struck.

It does report a large increase in robberies, both involving a firearm and not, and increases in every property crime listed.

Now, in the midst of a heat wave, assaults by three ‘unruly’ teenaged girls on Thursday, which led to vandalism, has now led the city to drain the pool and close it for the rest of the season. City Parks and Recreation said that the pool was closed due to concerns for the safety of staff and visitors, and that this pool, in the crime-ridden Kensington section, has had many problems, including multiple break-ins after hours. The Parks Department did not say that the staff had all just up and quit, or refused to work at that pool again, but the city has had a serious shortage of lifeguards for the pools, and opened only 50 of the 65 pools in the city.

The last Republican mayor of Philadelphia left office when Harry Truman was still President of the United States. Perhaps, just perhaps, the policies of the Democrats who have run the city for the last 70 years just don’t work very well.

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“She snuck out that night and been with some bad friends.”

We have previously noted the murder of James “Simmie” Lambert, 73, beaten to death by a group of seven young Philadelphia teens. There’s outrage in the city, as people have been asking, over and over again, why a group of kids ranging from (at least) 10 to 14 years old were out on the streets running wild at 2:30 in the morning on Friday, June 24th. ‘Where were their parents?’ is the usual cry.

Gamara Mosley, mugshot by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

Well, one of the parents, the mother of 14-year-old Gamara Mosley, who has been charged with third-degree murder, was dumb enough to talk to reporters:

‘I’m sorry, as a parent’: Mother of 14-year-old charged in death of James Lambert, Jr. speaks out

By Alex Holley | Published July 15, 2022 11:33PM | Updated July 16, 2022 7:17AM | Philadelphia | FOX 29 Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA – Young teens are charged as adults in the deadly assault of 73-year-old James Lambert, Jr. and the mother of one of those teens, 14-year-old Gamara Mosley, sat down with Alex Holley Friday to talk about her daughter.

“All social media about me and my child is not true. I’m not a bad mom,” mom Shara stated.

A whole lot of people would disagree that Shara — no last name is given in the article — isn’t a bad mother.

“What do you say to some people who looked at that video and say, ‘How could a good kid be capable of something like that, beating a 73-year-old man with the traffic cone to his death?” Holley asked.

“It’s the other kids and, you know, bad influence. She probably didn’t know, didn’t mean to do it,” Shara answered.

From Chapter 18 §2502.

Young Miss Mosley is shown, on the surveillance video, picking up a traffic cone and throwing it at the victim’s head, but hey, she probably didn’t really mean to do that. Perhaps, just perhaps, had Shara been a good mother, and taught her lovely daughter that assaulting an elderly, partially disabled man — photos of Mr Lambert show him holding a cane — is not a good or acceptable thing to do, her daughter wouldn’t be locked up and facing a first-degree felony in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Under Pennsylvania Chapter 18 §2502, as I read it, young Miss Mosley could have just as easily been charged with second-degree murder.

Under Pennsylvania Title 18 §106(b)(2), “A crime is a felony of the first degree if it is so designated in this title or if a person convicted thereof may be sentenced to a term of imprisonment, the maximum of which is more than ten years.” The normal sentence would be 10 to 20 years, but it could be longer. Second-degree murder can carry a sentence of life in prison.

“Since her dad’s gone, it’s just…things are different cause we ain’t got that family no more, like we used to have. We used to be in the house and stuff like that as a family,” Shara explained. “She’s going through a lot.”

“Why was it important for you to talk to us?” Holley asked.

“That’s my daughter and I care. And, like I said, she wasn’t with me when it happened. She snuck out that night and been with some bad friends,” Shara answered.

“So, she’s never snuck out before?” Holley asked.

“No,” Shara replied.

Just how does her mother know that Miss Mosley has never “snuck” out before?

Shara apologized to the family of Mr Lambert in the interview, but the family were having none of it:

Family of 73-year-old murder victim speaks out, asking for all involved to be charged

By Shawnette Wilson | Published July 15, 2022 11:46PM

Richard Jones, mugshot by Philadelphia Police Department, and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

CENTER CITY – James Lambert’s niece says she wants all of the kids charged and she doesn’t accept an apology she heard from one of the parents Friday evening.

“She’s not a bad kid. Why did she have to be around them kids that make her do them things?” stated the mother of one of the two teens charged, Shara.

Tania Stephens, the niece of James Lambert, Jr, reacting to the words from the from Shara, whose 14-year-old daughter, Gamara Mosley, is charged with murder and conspiracy in the death of Lambert.

14-year-old Richard Jones and Mosley are both charged with Third Degree Murder and Conspiracy, as adults, which is why their photos are being shown.

A 10-year-old was released and not charged and a 13-year-old girl, whose lawyer says she tried to stop it, was also released and isn’t facing charges.

Stephens reached out to FOX 29 to speak after seeing, over the past week, four children turn themselves in with lawyers and their family alongside them. “I want everyone to be charged. Everyone. I don’t want house arrest. They were all part of the crime, no matter if they actually threw a cone. They were there and everyone is guilty even the parents, from the 10-year-old, to the parents.”

Miss Stephens continued to say that those who physically assaulted Mr Lambert should be charged with murder, and those in the group who did not should be charged with aiding and abetting.

It has to be asked: what legal liabilities do the parents of these seven delinquents face? They clearly failed in their responsibilities as parents to rear their children properly. The answer is that they almost certainly face no legal problems, though they ought to be at the very least ostracized and run out of town. Of course, that would just mean that some other town would wind up with those parents living there.

The area in which Mr Lambert was murdered is not that bad looking. A row house at 2021 Cecil B Moore Avenue, a block from 21th Street where the murder occurred, is currently for sale, listed at $439,900, while another in the general area is listed at $405,900. There are some other properties in the area listed for lower, but some of them are vacant lots.

Yes, I do look at real estate listings to judge the character of a neighborhood, though I can’t imagine spending over $400,000 for those places. Of course, the fact that we just bought a house in better condition — at least now that my nephew and I redid the plumbing — than the ones listed for a whopping $69,999 might color my opinion on that, but that house is in a small town in east-central Kentucky!

I have to say that I agree with Miss Stephens: all of these kids need to be charged. I can understand why some people are reluctant to charge a 10-year-old, but in Pennsylvania, 10-year-olds can be declared delinquents, and the 10-year-old in question is the brother of 14-year-old Richard Jones, charged with murder, and very probably brought up the same as Mr Jones. The attorney of a 13-year-old girl involved claimed that she attempted to stop the beating, and called 911 to get Mr Lambert help after it was over, but she was still there, and under Pennsylvania law, she was an accomplice.

As we previously noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer printed an OpEd piece, 2½ weeks after Mr Lambert was murdered, claiming that the Commonwealth should cease charging juveniles with crimes to be tried in adult courts. But criminals charged as juveniles have one huge advantage: not only are they released based on age rather than the severity of the crime, but juvenile records are sealed, meaning that, if soft-hearted and soft-headed, social and racial justice warrior District Attorney Larry Krasner gets the charges knocked down to juvenile offenses, Mr Jones and Miss Mosley and perhaps some of the other three killers who have yet to turn themselves in, or be apprehended, could, after age 18, return into the community and apply for any job they wanted, and the fact that they killed somebody would not appear on their records.

If tried as adults, they would still get out of jail when they are in their prime crime-committing years.

Yes, despite her claim, it appears that Shara is a bad mother, but its more than that. Several mothers and (absent?) fathers were bad parents, in that they were allowing teenagers that young to roam the streets of North Philadelphia at 2:30 in the morning. What decent parent does that? Beyond that, the entire community apparently tolerates kids that age to be out on the streets at that time of the morning, and nothing is said.

Jail will (hopefully) punish these kids, but the prospect of prison doesn’t seem to deter most of the other bad kids in North Philly, and the cops can’t be everywhere; the Philadelphia Police Department are undermanned now, but even at full staffing they can’t cover everything.

The real solution, if there is one at all, must come from within the community itself. The people in the community must ostracize the bad kids, and rear the children who still have a chance at leading decent, normal lives to be good citizens. Race and poverty are not valid excuses.