Tag Archives: #Crime

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Even now, Jayana Webb is catching a bit of a break

On March 25, 2022, we reported in The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to ramp up sympathy for the drunk driver who killed three men how our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper tried to ‘humanize’ Jayana Webb, to let readers know that it was not just the three men she killed but her own life which was now so negatively impacted.

Miss Webb had been pulled over by State Troopers Brendan Sisca, 29, Martin Mack,33, for doing 110 MPH in a 50 MPH zone of southbound Interstate 95. She got away with that, because the Troopers were suddenly called to a man trying to jump median barriers near Lincoln Financial Field. The Troopers let Miss Webb go, and found Reyes Rivera Oliveras, a 28-year-old electrician, around the median barriers.

Miss Webb, a very fortunate woman for getting away with that speeding and reckless driving stop, then headed south herself, and struck Messrs Siska, Mack, and Oliveras, so hard that she tore the doors off the State Police vehicle, sending the Troopers flying over the median divider, and the three men all to their deaths.

Unfortunately, reckless did not translate into wreckless.

    Webb, who prosecutors said admitted to drinking Hennessy cognac that night, proceeded south on I-95 and crashed into the three men at such a speed that the impact ripped the doors off their stopped state police SUV and sent the troopers flying over a highway divider.

The troopers and Mr Oliveras were in the left hand median; to have struck them, Miss Webb had to have been driving down the “hammer” lane, the left-hand passing lane. She got away with speeding, and she was speeding again.

Webb now faces three counts of third-degree murder and potentially decades in prison. Her friends are reckoning with how a popular and promising young entrepreneur ended up in jail without bail over the deaths of three men.

“(A) popular and promising young entrepreneur”, huh? Here the Inquirer was trying to humanize her, to make her sympathetic character, not a killer, not a murderess, but just some poor thing who happened to make a mistake.

Image of tweet, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

By the time Webb’s mugshot hit national news, she had already shown indications of reckless driving. Tweets from before the crash quickly emerged in which she bragged about drinking and driving. One January post read: “If you ask me, I’m the best drunk driver ever.”

Some in her social circle, meanwhile, were in shock. How could Webb — a track-and-field star with no past DUIs and a hair-braiding business — be responsible for the deaths of three people?

Jayana Webb perp walk, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

Some said Webb deserves what’s coming. Others, sometimes posting under the hashtag “#TeamJay,” said Webb made a terrible error, egged on by a pervasive culture of casual drunk driving.

“What she did was not right,” said a friend, who spoke to the The Inquirer on condition of anonymity due to the high-profile nature of the case. “But at the same time we’re all human and we all make mistakes.”

There’s more at the original, and it’s utterly disgusting. The Inquirer let us know what a wonderful person she really was, someone who just happened to get caught up in a culture of drinking, partying hearty, and driving drunk. Remember: the Inquirer also tried to make a martyr out of 12-year-old Thomas Siderio, Jr, who fired a shot at Philadelphia Police officers, and wrote about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes as though he was an innocent kid just walking to school, when he was not.

It’s really not her fault, you know, she just made a mistake.

A mistake that left three men, three men with families, three apparently hard-working men, stone cold graveyard dead.

Well, she has now been sentenced.

Pregnant woman faces up to 60 years in prison for DUI crash that killed two state troopers and a civilian

Jayana Webb, 23, will start her prison term of 27.5 to 60 years in prison early next year, after giving birth to her child, her attorney said.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Wednesday, November 22, 2023 | 2:26 PM EST

A Montgomery County woman will serve between 27.5 and 60 years in prison after pleading guilty Wednesday to driving drunk and fatally striking two Pennsylvania State Troopers and the civilian they were assisting on I-95 last spring.

Jayana Webb, 23, of Eagleville, pleaded guilty to three counts of third degree murder, three counts of homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence, and one count of DUI for fatally hitting Troopers Martin Mack III, 33, and Branden T. Sisca, 29, along with Reyes Rivera Oliveras, 28, with her car on I-95 in the early morning hours of March 21, 2022.

As part of the terms of her guilty plea, Webb, who is seven months pregnant, will be allowed to remain out of custody until she gives birth in February, her attorney Michael Walker said. After she gives birth, Webb will be allowed some bonding time with the child before she reports to prison, he said.

This is the part that really pisses me off annoys me. She should go to jail, go directly to jail! She was out on bail, at least long enough to go out and get knocked up, and now, even after her sentencing, gets time before having to report to prison to have the baby, and then additional time to ‘bond with’ the unfortunate child. While the Commonwealth cannot force her to give up her baby for adoption, she should still go to prison immediately, be released to the hospital when she is ready to be delivered of the child, and then go immediately back to jail, to let whomever is going to care for the baby to bond with the child, not with Miss Webb. If she is going to serve a minimum of 27½ years, the child will be well into adulthood when his mother gets out of the slammer.

In a statement, District Attorney Larry Krasner called Wednesday’s guilty plea and sentencing by Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara A. McDermott a “just resolution” to “one of the most shocking incidents of vehicular violence in recent memory.”

A “just resolution”? Will Messrs Siska, Mack, and Oliveras have come back to life in 27½ years? Will they be walking and talking and enjoying life with their families in the sixty years which constitutes her maximum sentence?

The newspaper was still trying to drum up sympathy for Miss Webb. The original title for the story, as I read it in the ‘tab’ in my browser, was “Drunk driver sentenced after killing 3 people in 2022,” but an editor changed it to “Pregnant woman faces up to 60 years in prison for DUI crash that killed two state troopers and a civilian”, just so readers catch that she is pregnant.

The newspaper also reported that Miss Webb’s blood alcohol level was 0.211, when tested sometime after the crash, so it must have been higher than that when the crash occurred. She also tested positive for marijuana use, though that test does not measure active marijuana intoxication at the time taken.

27½ years means that Miss Webb will be somewhere around 50 to 51 years old when her minimum sentence has been served; if she has to do the full 60, she wouldn’t get out until she’s 83 or 84. According to the state Department of Corrections, a prisoner must serve the entire minimum sentence before becoming eligible for parole.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl!

At some point, you’d think that education professionals, all of whom have collegiate degrees, would be smarter than this, but I guess if you did think that, you’d be wrong. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A guidance counselor at a Bucks County middle school had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student, police say

Kelly Schutte had multiple sexual encounters with the teen this year, both in her car and at the teen’s home in West Rockhill Township, according to police.

by Vinny Vella | Friday, November 10, 2023 | 12:52 PM EST | Updated: 2:21 PM EDT Continue reading →

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Killadelphia The numbers are down, but Philly will still see well over 400 murders in 2023

The ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties of Hallowe’en have left, and, according to the Philadelphia Police Department, there have been 358n homicides through the end of October in the City of Brotherly Love. Yes, that number is a great improvement over the same date during the past three years, but, if you open the website, you’ll see that, for other than the last three years, it is a higher to date total than any of the other years listed, going back through 2007. More, 358 is higher than the entire year totals for 2008 through 2019.

Oh, that “*Annual percentage change compared to same day in 2021” footnote? That’s wrong; it’s the annual percentage change compared to the same day in the previous year, 2022, not 2021, a sloppiness I reported back on April 27th, and something I reported to the Police Department vis Twitter back then; it still hasn’t been corrected.

So, how do the numbers work out? Hallowe’en was the 304th day of the year, which means Philly has been seeing 1.1776 homicides per day, which, multiplied by 365 days in the year, yields 429.84 total murders for 2023. That’s certainly a great improvement over the past three years, but, assuming 430 homicides for the year, 2023 will still be higher than any year since 1995, other, of course, than the last three. And, if the number winds up 430, it will mean that the triumvirate of Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw[1]Miss Outlaw resigned as of September 22nd to take a lower-level job with the Port Authority of New York, because she knew she was toast in Philadelphia. will have averaged slightly more than 500 homicides per year, 501.75 to be exact, during their four years together. For that number to drop below 500 would require the city to see only 422 killings this year, possible but improbable.

References

References
↑1 Miss Outlaw resigned as of September 22nd to take a lower-level job with the Port Authority of New York, because she knew she was toast in Philadelphia.
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How many crimes are connected to the killing of Josh Kruger?

Josh Kruger and his cat, Mason.

We have fairly extensively covered the murder of homosexual and homeless advocate Josh Kriger in Philadelphia:

Once the allegations that the 39-year-old Mr Kruger had been sexually involved with his 19-year-old alleged murderer, since the (alleged) killer, Robert Davis, was 15 — in Pennsylvania, the age of consent is 16, not 18 — the story changed fairly dramatically. All of the ‘tributes’ for Mr Kruger suddenly dried up. If any sexual activity took place while Mr Davis was 15, Mr Kruger would have been, under Pennsylvania Title 18 §3122(1)(b), guilty of a first-degree felony. Mr Kruger was a minor celebrity in Philly, and had a lot of friends, including Mayor Jim Kenney. Among those who followed him on Twitter were District Attorney Larry Krasner, the District Attorney’s Office, Inquirer editorial writer Daniel Pearson, and CNN’s Jake Tapper. Now that Mr Davis’ family are telling us that Mr Kruger was a sexual predator, essentially a chickenhawk, and everyone seemed to just keep their mouths tightly shut. Continue reading →

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The left only care about gun control when white people get killed, and heterosexual white men are the killers

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar, with a “Bud Light” sign in the window.

As we have previously noted, the very lovely Amanda Marcotte, native Texan and later Brooklynite, moved away from the Big Apple to South Philadelphia sometime in late 2018 or early 2019. I have no idea if Marc Faletti, her POSSLQ, and she still live in the City of Brotherly Love, because, at least in her gig with Salon, she almost never writes about the city, but, at least for this article, I’m operating under the assumption that they still do.

Miss Marcotte might not really care that much about Philly, but she certainly does care about guns, or at least she does when a white guy kills a bunch of other mostly white people! Continue reading →

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Crime is crime; why should we care about the motive?

I have asked this question before: why is it somehow worse if someone beats you up because he hates you for being a member of some accredited victim group than if he beats you up because he wants to steal your wallet? From Robert Stacy McCain:

Detroit Police Say Anti-Semitism Not Motive in Synagogue Leader’s Murder

by Robert Stacy McCain | October 24, 2023

Very important update on the case:

Detroit police said investigators have looked into several people of interest in the killing of Samantha Woll, the president of a Detroit synagogue. Woll was found stabbed to death outside her home on Saturday morning.

In a press conference on Monday, Detroit Police Chief James White declined to unveil the connection between Woll and the people of interest, declaring a prime suspect cannot be named at the time.

“We have to be very, very cautious as to what information we share,” White said. “There are very intricate details about this case that, if revealed, could really damage what we’re trying to accomplish. There are facts that are known only to our suspect.” Continue reading →

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Is justice in Philadelphia a matter of the color of your skin?

We reported, on October 5th, on the charges against Cody Monroe Heron, 26, the (alleged) numbskull who road raged against a delivery driver, who jumped on the trunk of her car, stomped out the rear window, showering kids in the back seat with shattered safety glass. Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News reported that the police-hating, George Soros-sponsored District Attorney, Larry Krasner asked for a whopping $5,000,000 bail to be set for Mr Heron, which certainly seemed excessive for the charges he faced. We pointed out that Mr Heron was a man of relatively modest, working class means, and that a $5,000,000 bail was likely impossible for him to meet.

The judge reduced Mr Krasner’s request, setting Mr Heron’s bail at $2,500,000.

As it turned out, Mr Heron was unable to meet that amount either. We then reported, on October 16th, that Mr Heron’s attorney sought a bail reduction for his client, but that, instead, Common Pleas Court Judge Vincent Furling instead increased his bail amount to $4,000,000. If Mr Heron was unable to make the $2,500,000 bail, raising it to $4,000,000 seemed to me to be an obvious attempt to keep Mr Heron, who is accused of serious crimes, but nevertheless has a clean previous record, locked up before his trial. The evidence against Mr Heron is pretty convincing, but he is, nevertheless, innocent until proven guilty.

And so we come to Michael Henry. Mr Henry has, allegedly, been a not-very-nice young man! Continue reading →

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Killadelphia To me, it's simple: no one who is guilty of murder should ever see the light of day again as a free man.

On Thursday, October 12th, Philadelphia Police Officers Richard Mendez, 50, and Raul Ortiz, 60, were when the officers attempted to stop a gang of goons from attempting to break in and steal a car in a parking garage at the Philadelphia International Airport. Officer Mendez was killed, and Officer Ortiz wounded. The officers returned fire, and one of ths suspects was wounded. Teenager Jesus Herman Madera Duran was wounded, and his accomplices threw him in the back of their Dodge Durango — which was reported stolen a weak earlier — and dumped him on the floor of a parking garage at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and then fled. Young Mr Duran, of Camden, New Jersey, was pronounced dead at CHOP. Continue reading →

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Trial by public opinion.

We reported, on October 5th, on the charges against Cody Monroe Heron, the (alleged) numbskull who road raged against a delivery driver, who jumped on the trunk of her car, stomped out the rear window, showering kids in the back seat with shattered safety glass.

Philadelphia police have charged a Frankford man in the viral Center City motorcyclist assault

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday afternoon they had charged Cody Monroe Heron with aggravated assault and possession of an instrument of crime.

by Beatrice Forman and Rodrigo Torrejón | Wednesday, October 4, 2023 | 8:16 AM EDT | Updated: 4:20 PM EDT

Philadelphia authorities say a 26-year-old man who stomped on and shattered the windshield of a woman’s car while her two children were in the back seat in a now-viral Center City assault has been charged with aggravated assault after he was arrested Tuesday night.

Police have charged Cody Monroe Heron, of the 4500 block of East Stiles Street in Frankford, for destroying the back windshield of a car being driven by a woman making deliveries for Uber Eats, with her girlfriend and their two children in tow, near City Hall on Sunday night. He also allegedly pointed a handgun at her and headbutted her with his motorcycle helmet.

With what is Mr Heron charged? As reported by Fox29’s Steve Keeley, the most serious of the charges are three counts of aggravated assault under Pennsylvania Title 18 §2702. No one was actually injured, but under section (a)(9),

attempts to cause or intentionally, knowingly or recklessly causes serious bodily injury to a child less than 13 years of age, by a person 18 years of age or older.

could be classified as a first-degree felony under section (b). Sentencing guidelines would normally be between ten and twenty years in the state penitentiary, along with a fine of up to $25,000.

Mr Keeley reported, District Attorney Krasner requested that bail for Mr Heron be set at $5,000,000, though the judge cut that in half, to $2,500,000.

The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution states, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

We also researched Mr Heron’s street, noting that his apparent living situation did not seem to be the type which would support being able to make such a huge bail amount, though whether he had family who could help with that was undisclosed. In the end, Mr Heron was not able to make bail, and requested a reduction in the amount:

Bail hiked to $4 million for motorcyclist accused of stomping out a mother’s car windshield in viral Center City incident

An attorney for Cody Heron requested a bail reduction in the viral assault case. Instead, the judge raised it by 60%.

by Max Marin | Monday, October 16, 2023

A Philadelphia judge on Monday raised the bail of a man who police say stomped out the windshield of a car occupied by two women and two young children in Center City earlier this month.

Common Pleas Court Judge Vincent W. Furlong raised the bail of Cody M. Heron, 26, of Frankford, from $2.5 million to $4 million and cleared the way for the case against him on assault and reckless endangerment charges to move to trial.

Authorities say Heron was near City Hall on the evening of Oct. 1 with a crowd of ATV, dirt bike and motorcycle riders, when he dismounted his bike and stomped out the rear window of a burgundy Ford Fusion before pulling a gun on the driver and then head-butting her with his bike helmet. The scene, which was captured by a tourist riding a nearby double-decker bus, garnered millions of views on social media.

The driver, Nicki Bullock, 23, got out of her car and confronted the motorcyclist, who then pointed a handgun in her face. Ignoring the threat, Bullock fought back, at one point pushing the motorcyclist off his bike before he fled the scene.

If the police correctly identified the assailant — the crime was captured on a now-viral video, and his attorney has as much as conceded that his client was correctly identified — Mr Heron is both stupid and violent, and if convicted, deserves to go to prison for a long, long time. But, at least thus far, Mr Heron has been convicted of nothing, and he is legally innocent until proven guilty.

Mr Heron’s next court appearance, his formal arraignment, is scheduled for Monday, October 30th. That means, unless there is a surprise development, that Mr Heron will have spent four weeks in jail for the crime of which he has been accused, but has not actually been either tried or convicted. He couldn’t make the $2,500,000 bail, yet Judge Furlong increased the bail amount anyway, in an obvious attempt to keep Mr Heron behind bars, despite the Eighth Amendment and despite Mr Heron not having been convicted of any crime. Judge Furlong is, in effect, punishing Mr Heron in advance.

Yes, the crime was a blatant one, and it was caught on video, but it is also true that no one was injured. People were outraged by it, but public outrage is no excuse for denying Mr Heron, about whom no media reports have painted as a flight risk, the reasonable bail required by the Bill of Rights.