Category Archives: Crime

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How does a lie become the truth?

Well, maybe I got it wrong. Maybe when I said that the credentialed media don’t (usually) print out-and-out lies, but show their bias in their editorial decisions about what stories to cover, and what to ignore, I was forgetting The Philadelphia Inquirer.

We had previously noted the shooting death of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, who was sitting in a parked, and possibly disabled, Chrysler PT Cruiser, with five other people, including other students assigned to E W Rhodes School, just after 9:00 AM on Friday, October 8, 2021, at the intersection of North Judson and West Clearfield Streets in North Philadelphia. The Rhodes Elementary School website notes that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

I pointed out to the Inquirer, and to reporter Anna Orso specifically, that young Mr Stokes was clearly not on his way to school, not if he was sitting in a parked car many blocks away; Miss Orso didn’t like it, but the fact that she responded means that she saw the notification.

People at the Inquirer know that young Mr Stokes was not on his way to class that day. But the lie was repeated again, on Thursday:

    Philly schools will pay community members to keep kids safe on their way to and from school amid gun violence crisis

    “There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not outraged by the acts of violence going on throughout the city of Philadelphia,” said Superintendent William R. Hite Jr.

    by Kristen A. Graham | Thursday, October 28, 2021

    The Philadelphia School District will spend close to a million dollars over the next three years to station members of the community in targeted communities in an effort to keep children safe on their way to and from schools.

    Based on a Chicago program, Philadelphia’s plan will start at four high schools: Lincoln, Motivation, Sayre and Roxborough, and expand to others. The “Safe Path” program will pay trusted community members and equip them with radios and bright, reflective vests to serve as eyes and ears — not to take physical action against anyone armed with a gun. Kevin Bethel, the district’s chief of school safety, said he wants Safe Path operational before the end of the school year.

    “I can no longer sit back and wait for volunteers while I see in some of our corridors the issues we’re having,” Bethel said. Details on what the groups will be paid and how they can apply will be shared soon, he said.

    The news comes amid a gun violence crisis that has affected schools across the city. This month, a shooting outside Lincoln just after dismissal killed a 66-year-old and gravely wounded a 16-year-old, and a 13-year-old seventh grader was killed on his way to classes at Rhodes Elementary.

There’s more at the original, but there it is, the claim that the “13-year-old seventh grader” was “on his way to classes,” and the embedded link goes to Miss Orso’s very sympathetic story about young Mr Stokes.

That’s not just a lie, but it is a deliberate lie.

Let’s face it: The First Street Journal doesn’t reach many people, far, far, far fewer than the Inquirer, and the continued pushing by that #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading, “anti-racist” newspaper is going to keep on and keep on reporting something that they know isn’t true until it becomes the ‘truth.’

But, let me give credit where credit is due, to Miss Orso. She may not have liked what I wrote, but in her next article on the subject, she got it right:

    Philadelphia police are searching for a man wanted in the shooting of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes

    Police say Shafeeq Lewis, 29, of North Philadelphia, fired a dozen shots into a parked car, killing the boy who was just blocks from his school.

    by Anna Orso | October 27, 2021

    Shafeeq Lewis, photo by Philadelphia Police Department.

    Philadelphia police are searching for a 29-year-old man who they say fatally shot a 13-year-old boy just blocks away from his school earlier this month, officials said Wednesday.

    Authorities say Shafeeq Lewis, of North Philadelphia, fired a dozen shots into a car that was parked on the 3100 block of North Judson Street about 9 a.m. on Oct. 8. Six young people were sitting in the vehicle and police said one of the shots struck 13-year-old Marcus Stokes in the chest. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he died of his injuries.

    Detectives obtained surveillance footage capturing the sound of gunshots, then a man dressed in dark clothing running from the scene. Deputy Police Commissioner Ben Naish said investigators believe Lewis was the man fleeing, and they obtained an arrest warrant on murder charges last week.

    Lewis remains at large, and investigators have not determined a motive.

There’s more at the original, but “just blocks from his school” is an accurate statement. I would like to think that my oh-so-mean tweets caused Miss Orso to look at how she was writing things, but I really have no idea.

I placed the mugshot of Shafeeq Lewis in the body of the Miss Orso’s article, but that picture was not on the Inquirer’s website. Rather, it was in this story from Channel 10, the NBC owned-and-operated affiliate in the City of Brotherly Love. Mr Lewis has several distinctive tattoos on his neck and face, and it’s obvious from the fact that the Philadelphia Police already had mugshots of Mr Lewis that he had come to their attention previously.

The Channel 10 story states that all of the people in the vehicle were minors, and were wounded.

So, what were the six kids doing in that car? Smoking pot? Handsy sex? Discussing the prospects for the Eagles or 76ers? None of the stories in the Philadelphia media have told us that, nor have the police released any suspected motive for the shooting, nor does anyone know if Mr Stokes, individually, was the (alleged) gunman’s target.

The Inquirer likes human interest stories, and when someone is murdered in the city, if the victim is an ‘innocent,’ the paper just loves that! But, as brilliant as I am, as careful a reader as I am, I doubt that I’m the only one who noticed that the initial stories on the shooting didn’t quite match up with the facts.

Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps Miss Orso didn’t share with others in the newsroom the issue I raised, and that’s why Kristen Graham, the reporter for the first cited story didn’t think twice about writing that young Mr Stokes was simply on his way to school. But I suspect that if the newspaper is trying to make out Mr Stokes as a completely innocent victim of “gun violence,” it might not work.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Hold them accountable! The Loudoun County school officials who covered up a rape all need to go to jail

I had actually ignored this story for awhile, figuring that Robert Stacy McCain would include it in his ‘Violence Against Women’ series, but, alas! he’s been working on other things. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

“Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Us?”: Angry Loudoun County Students Stage Walk Outs Over Sexual Assaults in Their Schools

Every student that participated in today’s walkouts should take their activism directly to the next school board meeting and demand answers and mass resignations.

Posted by Teri Christoph | Tuesday, October 26, 2021 | 07:00 PM

Students in Loudoun County have had enough. They’ve endured lockdowns, distance learning, all-day masking, and attempts to teach them a radicalized curriculum, all while their county’s partisan and inept school board declared war on their parents and failed to keep schools safe.

What finally moved the students to action, though, was the revelation that one of their own — and possibly two — was sexually assaulted inside a school, the very place kids should feel safe and secure. To make matters worse, the superintendent, Scott Ziegler, failed to inform parents and students that attacks had taken place, thus jeopardizing every student in the county.

Today, hundreds of Loudoun County students walked out of their classrooms, protesting the treatment of the victims, the victims’ families, and the student bodies of every high school, who were kept in the dark about the danger looming in their schools.

There’s more at the original.

Why didn’t the school inform the students what had happened? A couple of reasons spring to mind:

  1. The school administration were afraid that, if the rapes were made known to the students, some students might have administered a ‘hands on’ lesson to the rapist. Even if the administration didn’t reveal the identity of the rapist, once the ‘incidents’ had become known about, there’s no way that the identity of the perpetrator would not have become known.
  2. The rapes were perpetrated by a male student who may have been claiming to be a ‘transgender’ girl.

Heaven forfend, we can’t have the students or the public in general know that a student assigned male at birth but identifying as a girl[1]Regular readers of this site will realize that I formulated that description mockingly. Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth, but determined at conception, and no amount of drugs, hormones or … Continue reading  committed these crimes. After all, that might lead to discrimination against the ‘transgendered,’ and that would be wrong!

Reports in the credentialed media have played down the transgender angle. In the article noting the rapist’s conviction, all we get is:

`The victim was assaulted in a women’s restroom at Stone Bridge High School by a male allegedly wearing a skirt.

One of the main arguments among conservatives, though not an argument I have chosen to make, is that males claiming to be female are doing so to gain access to female-only public restrooms and locker rooms, for voyeuristic purposes, and possible even for sexual assault. The Loudoun County case reinforces the arguments of conservatives that biological males should not be treated as females for such purposes, and the left cannot have that!

Would other students have beaten the crap out of administered a ‘hands on’ lesson to the perpetrator? Perhaps they would have, but that possibility could easily have been avoided had the school district done the right thing and removed the perpetrator from school entirely. But the school district’s actions, to ‘protect the rights’ of the rapist, and a possibly ‘transgendered’ student, resulted in a second girl getting raped.

The article concluded:

Every student that participated in today’s walkouts should take their activism directly to the next school board meeting and demand answers and mass resignations. This isn’t about petty partisan politics anymore, it’s about safety.

Yes, but that’s not enough. In the Keystone State, former Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, all went to jail — albeit not for long sentences — for child endangerment and other charges in the Jerry Sandusky case, because they failed to call the police to report Mr Sandusky’s rape of a young boy when informed about it.

Loudoun County did worse. Mr Sandusky was, at least, banned from the Penn State athletic facilities, but in Virginia, the school district simply transferred the rapist to another school, where he was free to rape again. I’ll put it bluntly: every member of the school board and administration who was aware of the first rape, and allowed the perpetrator to simply be transferred, needs to be criminally charged and sent to prison! Hold them accountable for their actions!

More, they should all be, individually, sued into penury. Their actions allowed a second girl to be raped! The school board and administration personnel are all adults, and are all responsible for the safety of students. The now-convicted rapist is only 15 years old, so he’ll receive a juvenile sentence. Knowing how northern Virginia has been ruined by the influx of federal government workers, a slap on the wrist would not surprise me.

But at least the adults can be prosecuted as adults, and face adult time in prison. It is only by holding people like them accountable for their actions that we can deter other officials from doing the same things.

References

References
↑1 Regular readers of this site will realize that I formulated that description mockingly. Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth, but determined at conception, and no amount of drugs, hormones or surgical interventions can change a person’s sex.
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Lexington is on pace for 38 homicides for 2021, which would easily break the record. The city has already seen 31 murders, which is good for second place all time, with 67 days left in the year

It was just ten days ago that we reported that Lexington had tied it’s then-record of 30 homicides recorded in 2019, a record rewritten with 34 killings in 2020. Alas! that number 30 didn’t last for long. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported a 9:50 PM Monday assault in the Victorian Square Parking Garage at 350 West Short Street, in which one man died at the scene from his injuries. A suspect was taken to the hospital with unspecified injuries.

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

    Victim’s name released. Man faces murder charge after fatal Lexington garage assault

    By Christopher Leach | October 26, 2021 | 7:37 AM EDT | Updated 11:43 AM EDT

    A man was killed after being assaulted in a downtown Lexington parking garage Monday night, according to Lexington police.

    John Tyler Abner, 31, was pronounced dead on scene due to blunt-trauma injuries sustained from the assault, according to the Fayette County coroner.

    Police have charged Benjamin Call, 39, with murder. Call is currently being held at the Fayette County Detention Center.

There’s more at the original; the Lexington Police believe that the victim and his (alleged) assailant knew each other prior to the assault.

The mugshot published here was, of course, not published by the Herald-Leader, but, as is our policy, The First Street Journal does publish such photos. The mugshot was from the Fayette County Detention Center, and is freely available as a matter of public record. It was available to the newspaper had the editors chosen to use it.

This is not Mr Call’s first brush with the law, given that the Detention Center had a previous mugshot of him, dated August 25, 2015.

This is the city’s first homicide of the year that was not committed with a firearm.
____________________________

Update: 7:20 PM EDT

It isn’t just The First Street Journal which publishes these mugshots. WLEX-TV, Channel 18, the Lexington NBC affiliate station, not only has the story, complete with mugshot available on their website, but ran the story, complete with mugshot, on the air at approximately 7:04 PM EDT.

The Herald-Leader’s idiotic mugshot policy — which is dictated to them by McClatchy Company, which owns the paper — doesn’t keep the mugshots of offenders charged with crimes off the internet, but simply withholds information from their subscribers, from people who are paying for their service.

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Killadelphia Black lives really don't matter in Philadelphia, or to The Philadelphia Inquirer

I noted, in a tweet Thursday morning, that under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, Philadelphia’s 443 homicides as of 11:59 PM Wednesday put the city in fifth place, all time, for homicides in the year, and there were still 72 days remaining in 2021.

Well, the move into fourth place didn’t take long:

    Three men killed, four people wounded, including a 14-year-old boy, in separate shootings in Philly

    The fatal shootings occurred in West Oak Lane and North Philadelphia.

    by Robert Moran | Thursday, October 21, 2021 | 8:49 PM EDT

    Three men were killed and four other people, including a 14-year-old boy, were wounded in separate shootings late Thursday in Philadelphia, police said.

    Around 3:45 p.m., a 25-year-old man was on the 1500 block of West 65th Avenue in West Oak Lane when he was shot once in the neck. He was pronounced dead at the scene by medics. Police said they recovered a gun and had a person in custody.

    About 5:50 p.m., a 28-year-old man was on the 900 block of Cambridge Street in North Philadelphia when he was shot several times in his torso. He was transported to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:22.

    The 14-year-old was shot four times at the same location and was taken by police to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition. Police reported no arrests in that case.

There’s more at the original.

Three people dead, plus a 21-year-old man shot five times in North Philadelphia, and a 20-year-old woman shot thrice in Hunting Park, listed in critical condition. Anyone want to bet that Mr Moran’s story won’t be found on the main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website on Friday morning?

This story posted at 9:45 PM EDT on Thursday, October 21st, and will be updated on Friday morning.

————————–

Update! Friday, October 22, 2021

Did someone recover from being dead? The Philadelphia Police Department reported on Thursday that 443 homicides had occurred as of 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, October 20th. Robert Moran’s article cited above tells us of three homicides in the city on Thursday, but the morning report from the Police Department this morning states that the homicide total as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday was 445.

It’s possible that one of the previous homicides has now been ruled self-defense, and subtracted from the total, but I do not know.

Nevertheless, 445 is still ‘good’ enough to push 2021 into fourth place all time, with 71 days remaining in the year. At 1.5136 homicides per day, Philadelphia is on pace for 552 homicides for the year. At the current rate, Philly should tie the all time record of 500 in 36 days, on November 26th, appropriately enough, ‘Black Friday.’

A thorough scan of the Inquirer’s website main page at 8:18 AM EDT this morning verified what I had already guessed: neither Mr Moran’s, or anyone else’s story about the reported murders yesterday were visible on the site. Mr Moran’s story is still available at the embedded link in his headline above, but if you just read the Inquirer through its website in the morning, you’d never see it. But, as I’ve said many times before, black lives don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer, unless, of course, they are taken by a white police officer.

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They can’t handle the truth!

Sometimes journolists[1]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 — and no, that’s not a misspelling — make a mistake and tell the truth, but, not to worry, they correct themselves as quickly as they can!

I spotted it through this oh-so-#woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading tweet from WJLA-TV, Channel 7, the ABC affiliate in the Metropolitan Washington, DC, area. It seems that they did something really radical like tell the truth, and then had to change it:

    Capitol Hill neighborhood sees rise in murders, violent crimes

    by Sam Ford | Monday, October 18th 2021

    WASHINGTON (7News) — In the past two weeks in one Capitol Hill neighborhood, there have been two homicides on the same block and at least two carjackings.

    The local ANC (Advisory Neighborhood Commission) Commissioner, Kirsten Oldenburg, Sunday found her living room window had been shot out the night before, presumably during the homicide of a Maryland man in front of her house.

    Oct. 7, around the corner, a flag football game on the Watkins School field ended with one player shooting to death another, after an argument. That was right across the street from DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson’s home.

    “I’ve lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood for five years. This is the first time there have been homicides in the immediate neighborhood,” said Mendelson in an interview, “I don’t want to be alarmist, I don’t think the city is more dangerous, but it shows that violent crime can occur anywhere.” . . . .

    A long-time DC resident, Oldenburg said this was the first time her home has been hit by a stray bullet, but she lamented there are some residents in other neighborhoods who worry about stay bullets coming into their homes, “24/7” she said.

There’s more at the original, but there was this gem at the bottom of the story:

Editor’s Note: After reviewing an earlier version of this story, we realized the tone did not accurately reflect our reporting concerning crime. The headline and lede have been updated.

Their offense? They ‘implied’ that “wealthy neighborhoods should have less crime.” But the truth is that wealthy neighborhoods do have less crime, and everybody knows that they have less crime.

And being the [insert slang term for the rectum here] that I am, I’ll continue with the part they really couldn’t say: But the truth is that wealthy white neighborhoods do have less crime, and everybody knows that they have less crime.

WJLA’s editorial management knew that “white” was implied with the term “wealthy neighborhoods”, and that just had to go.

Journalists tell the truth, the unvarnished truth, and let the chips fall where they may; journolists have to massage the message so as not to offend anyone, or disturb liberal notions, or upset the woke.

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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The witnesses who sat by and did nothing should be publicly identified and publicly shamed A woman is raped on a SEPTA train, and not one other passenger had the courage to stop it or even call 911

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain is incensed:

From the New York Post:

Passengers do nothing as woman is raped on Philadelphia train, cops say

By Eileen AJ Connelly | October 16, 2021 | 2:39 PM EDT Updated 5:06 PM EDT

A homeless man raped a woman this week on a commuter train in suburban Philadelphia in full view of other passengers –who cops said didn’t lift a finger to help, or even dial 911, reports said.

The attack at around 10 p.m. Wednesday was captured on surveillance video that showed other people in the train car, according to Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt of the Upper Darby Police Department.

“Were they watching? I don’t know. Again, we’re still going through the video but there was a lot of people, in my opinion, that should’ve intervened. Somebody should’ve done something.,” Bernhardt said, Philadelphia’s CBS-3 reported.

“It speaks to where we are in society; I mean, who would allow something like that to take place? So it’s troubling.”

Bernhardt said it was a Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority employee who called the cops to report that “something wasn’t right” with a woman aboard the train.

SEPTA police waiting at the next stop were able to “apprehend the suspect in the act,” an agency spokesman said in a statement, according to NBC-10 Philadelphia.

They arrested Fiston Ngoy, 35, who is believed to be homeless, the station reported.

Ngoy was charged with rape, aggravated indecent assault and related counts, police said.

He remains behind bars in lieu of 10% of $180,000 bail, Philadelphia’s ABC-6 reported.

Bernhardt said he is known to both SEPTA and Upper Darby police.

The woman, who did not know her attacker, was taken to a hospital. Bernhardt called her an “unbelievably strong woman” who provided police with a lot of information, The Associated Press reported.

“She’s on the mend,” Bernhardt said. “Hopefully she will get through this.”

SEPTA issued a statement calling the attack a “horrendous criminal act.”

“There were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911,” the authority said.

Or maybe it would have been stopped sooner if people had the courage to intervene physically. Were there no men on that train at all? We may eventually find out that there were some males on that train, but it’s obvious that none of them were actually men.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had an article on the assault, but, of course, the Inquirer would never publish the (alleged) rapist’s mugshot:

SEPTA reports rape on Market-Frankford Line, says no one called 911

A rape occurred Wednesday night but riders did not report it, SEPTA said.

by Stephan Salisbury | Saturday, October 16, 2021

A woman was raped on the Market-Frankford Line on Wednesday night in a car with other passengers but none called 911.

Their failure to do that was noted by SEPTA in an unusual statement — and condemned by the police chief in Upper Darby, where the attack took place.

“There was a lot of people in my opinion that should have intervened, somebody should have done something,” Police Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt said. “It speaks to where we are in society and who would allow something like that to take place. So it’s troubling.”

In the statement Friday, the SEPTA agency said that “anyone witnessing an emergency” needed to report it immediately.

Report it immediately? How about take action to stop it?

Frank Herbert, in Dune, noted fear, and how fear had to be overcome. But our governments, federal and state and city, have spent the last year and a half trying to instill fear into the public, and it looks like they have succeeded: a train car full of people, and no one of them had the courage to intervene, to stop a rape being perpetrated right in front of them.

“The assault was observed by a SEPTA employee, who called 911, enabling SEPTA officers to respond immediately and apprehend the suspect in the act,” the agency said. ”There were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911.” . . . .

Bernhardt said the assault was caught entirely on surveillance video. Bernhardt said they are reviewing the footage, in part to look at the passengers.

Good, and I hope that tape is revealed, and every passenger, especially every male passenger, in that railcar is identified, by name and by photograph, and their information published, widely published, so that everyone knows who they are, and what they were too cowardly to do. I noted that neither story indicated that the (alleged) assailant was armed, with a knife or a firearm.

All it would have taken was one man, just one, to rally the other passengers to intervene and stop the assault, but no one did. Those people need to be publicly shamed, publicly humiliated, and the men males divorced by their wives.

The alleged assailant had been previously convicted of drug possession in 2015, and had been arrested both last year and this in both Philadelphia and Delaware County on charges that included public drunkenness, resisting arrest, and scalping tickets. The Defender Association of Philadelphia, which provides lawyers for people too poor to hire one, had been providing him with representation on the ticket scalping charge.

This crime happened not in Philadelphia, but in Delaware County, and if there’s any good at all in this, it’s that Mr Ngoy won’t be prosecuted by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who would give him a serious, serious! slap on the back of the hand, and maybe even a stern talking to.

There was a time in which, had this occurred then, the other men on that train would have rushed to the victim’s defense and beaten the assailant to a bloody pulp. But fear, fear! was upon them, upon a population cowed into masks and isolation and indifference.

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Lexington ties the 2019 record! Not a good record to tie

We noted, on October 5th, Lexington’s 29th homicide of 2021, and how Lexington was just one behind the then record of 30, set in 2019, but, of course, the record was broken again, with 34 in 2020. Well, that didn’t last long!

    Man dies after double shooting near Tates Creek High School in Lexington

    by Christopher Leach | October 14, 2021 | 12:10 PM EDT | Updated: 4:26 PM EDT

    One of two people shot outside a Lexington apartment building died, Lexington police said Thursday.

    Andre Holloway, 46, died at University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital where he was taken after the shooting, according to the Fayette County coroner’s office.

There’s more at the original. A previous article, published at 8:17 AM the same day, noted the double shooting, but Mr Holloway hadn’t been reported as having died at the time. Neither the Lexington Shootings Investigations page nor the Homicide Investigations page have, as of this writing, been updated to include this crime.

Thirty murders in 286 days works out to 0.104895 per day, or 38.29 for the year. If that rate holds, it will not only smash the record set just last year, but give the city a homicide rate of 11.71 per 100,000 population.

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The ‘journalism’ of The Philadelphia Inquirer

North Judson and West Clearfield Streets in North Philadelphia. Image from Google Maps.

We have said, many times, that black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love in which the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim.

However, sometimes the Inquirer tries to paint someone as an innocent victim, but the details of the story, stories in this case, just don’t add up.

    Gunshots took a 13-year-old who was friends with everyone. At his North Philadelphia school, it’s ‘utter devastation.’

    A teacher at E.W. Rhodes School said seventh-grader Marcus Stokes was bright with an infectious smile, and that his peers “really enjoyed being his friend.”

    by Anna Orso | Friday, October 15, 2021

    Four days after 13-year-old Marcus Stokes was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school, his fellow students came back to the classroom at lunchtime to set up a makeshift memorial.

    They hung up a picture of Marcus that their teacher, Marcella Hankinson, had printed at Staples, and they strung balloons of blue and white, his favorite colors. They placed candles and a single rose next to a teddy bear on his desk, and they scrawled messages to him on red sticky notes next to his picture.

    The death has left students and teachers at E.W. Rhodes School traumatized, fearful, and in a state of “utter devastation,” said Principal Andrea Surratt, who oversees the school that serves kids in kindergarten through eighth grade. It’s the first time a student was fatally shot in her four years at the helm, and it took place five blocks from the school, triggering an hour-long lockdown.

There’s more at the original.

West Clearfield Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

The murder of Young Marcus Stokes happened at on North Judson Street, at the intersection with West Clearfield Street. If you look at the map, North Judson is not five blocks from the school, which is at 2900 West Clearfield Street, but eleven blocks. It’s just a hair over 1/3 mile between the two.

Anna Orso’s story says, further down:

    Investigators believe Marcus and five other young people — including other Rhodes students — were sitting in a parked car on the 3100 block of Judson Street before 9 a.m. on Oct. 8. A gunman approached the vehicle and fired shots into it, hitting Marcus once in the chest, authorities said.

Yet a previous Inquirer story stated that Mr Stokes was shot “just after 9 a.m.” That’s an important difference, because the E Washington Rhodes School website states “Breakfast will be served from 8:15 am to 8:45 am each day. All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.” If you read Miss Orso’s story carefully, she stated that Mr Stokes and five other E W Rhodes’ students were “were sitting in a parked car on the 3100 block of Judson Street before 9 a.m.”, not that the victim was actually shot before 9:00 AM. Miss Orso has to have been aware of the previous article noting that he was shot after 9:00 AM, because she was one of the two Inquirer reporters who wrote it!

But, if you didn’t know that the shooting itself didn’t take place until after 9:00 AM, perhaps, just perhaps, you wouldn’t figure out that no, young Mr Stokes was not on his way to school. He should have been on his way, but it is obvious that he wasn’t.

Also in the earlier story which Miss Orso co-wrote with reporter Chris Palmer was this statement:

    (Chief Inspector Frank) Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.

Miss Orso had to know that those kids weren’t driving to school, but she still wrote that the victim was “on his way to school”.

The Inquirer published the picture of the vehicle in question, a Plymouth PT Cruiser, not a particularly large vehicle, one in which six people aren’t normally going to cram just to have a chat or pray the rosary. Sunrise was at 7:03 AM on that day, and the weather was unseasonably warm, yet the photo of the vehicle shows all of the windows closed. What, some might ask, were six kids doing, sitting in a parked car with the windows rolled up 15 minutes after they were supposed to be in school? If the police know, if Miss Orso knows, such has not been revealed to readers of the Inquirer.

Back to the first cited article:

    Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said officers found 12 shell casings at the scene, and investigators have recovered some surveillance footage showing a possible suspect fleeing. No one has been arrested. Smith said detectives have not determined a motive but don’t believe Marcus was the shooter’s intended target. He did not elaborate.

So, who in the vehicle was the intended target? When you read about an intentional ‘hit’ like this, the most common answers which leap to mind are ‘rival gang member’ or ‘rival drug dealer’. Other characterizations could come to mind, but few would guess ‘community organizer’ or ‘Baptist youth minister.’ And the fact that we haven’t been told that the possibly intended target was a community organizer or Baptist youth minister, which is the kind of information which would have been disclosed if true, leads one to believe that ‘rival gang member’ or ‘rival drug dealer’ is the more probable guess.

Who is Anna Orso? Her Linkedin biography tells us that she has:

    spent the last seven years as a reporter in Philadelphia covering mostly general assignment and breaking news. I’m currently a member of the Justice and Injustice team at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is part of its broader News Desk. My coverage is focused on issues related to public safety and policing.

She isn’t someone three months out of a small college journalism program, but earned her Baccalaureate degree in “Print Journalism, sociology/ criminology” in 2014. Yet she wrote a story in which her statements contradicted what has been previously published, contradicted the timeline, and contradicted the map. She made young Mr Stokes into an innocent victim, when what has been published about this crime throws doubt on that notion.

An actual journalist would have looked at the points I have made, and done something really radical like investigated more deeply and more thoroughly. Who knows? Perhaps young Mr Stokes really was an ‘innocent,’ but if he was, Miss Orso didn’t do much in answering the obvious questions around the time and place of the shooting. Was the Inquirer really so desperate to paint him as a boy doing nothing wrong, just going to school on a Friday morning, that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dig for the truth?

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You can’t fix the problem if you won’t admit what the problem is

Philadelphia’s homicide rate has skyrocketed since Mayor Jim Kenney took office, and only gotten worse since George Soros-sponsored police hater Larry Krasner became District Attorney. The appointment of left coaster Danielle Outlaw –she was formerly Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and a deputy chief in Oakland, California — didn’t improve things.

From October 12, 2020 through October 12, 2021, 551 bodies have littered the streets of America’s sixth largest city. With a population of 1,603,797, that works out to a homicide rate of 34.36 per 100,000 population. As we noted just a few days ago, the city is on track for 554 homicides this year, so the rate has remained constant, despite a slowdown in killings from mid-July through August.

But the city’s homicide rate for all of 2020 wasn’t that high: it was ‘just’ 31.11 for the entire year, even though that year saw 499 homicides, just one short of 1990’s all-time record. No, the killing rate got far, far worse after the death of George Floyd while resisting arrest in Minneapolis, and the summer long protests, demonstrations and #BlackLivesMatter riots against the police. Continue reading →