On Sunday, November 28, 2021, Temple University student and a fellow with Philadelphia City Commissioner’s Office, Samuel Sean Collington, 21, was robbed and then murdered near the school in North Philadelphia. Mr Collington was a white victim, murdered by a black juvenile named Latif Williams in a botched robbery. On Thursday, December 2, 2021, The Philadelphia Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him.
On Thursday, September 22, 2022, recent Drexel graduate Everett Beauregard, 23, was senselessly murdered, shot in the neck.
Now there’s another senseless murder of 22-year-old William Schmidt, a Penn State student, in South Philly:
The victim lived just steps away from where he was killed.
by Michelle Myers and Andrew Kitchenman | Sunday, June 7, 2026 | 1:59 PM EDT
A 22-year-old Penn State student died after being shot a half block from his home in South Philadelphia early Saturday, police said.
Police said officers from the 1st District responded at 1:32 a.m. to a radio call for a person with a gun on the 1900 block of Durfor Street. They found William J. Schmidt lying in the street with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.
Schmidt was returning home from a local bar where he had been watching the NBA Finals with friends, according to his father, 6abc reported.
Surveillance cameras captured video that appeared to show the moments before the shooting, 6abc reported. A man can be seen throwing a cell phone in one video, and seconds later, another man ran around a corner with Schmidt chasing him, before the gunman turned around and shot him, according to another video.
There’s more at the original.
Note that there was video, but the newspaper simply referred to the suspects as “a man”, “another man”, and “the gunman”. Now, on Wednesday, 6ABC released images of the suspects, and though they do not describe the suspects, we can see that the suspects are black males. Perhaps the newspaper, the day after Karmelo Anthony, a black male, was convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf, a white teenager, the Inquirer doesn’t want to fan any flames of racial hatred. Those who love to fan the flames of racial hatred have been decrying the fact that Mr Anthony was convicted at all, but at least as I am typing this, the Inky has neither any stories on the trial or the Usual Suspects among the columnists pontificating on the subject.
But that doesn’t mean the newspaper won’t have any stories about a black man being murdered by a white criminal!
Dmitriy Popov faces up to 25 years in prison for killing O’Shae Sibley at a Brooklyn gas station in 2023.
by Rob Tornoe | Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | 4:38 PM EDT
A Brooklyn man has been convicted in the killing of beloved Philadelphia dancer O’Shae Sibley, who was stabbed to death at a New York City gas station in 2023.
Dmitriy Popov, 20, was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime and other charges related to “taunting, stabbing, and killing” Sibley, which included “hurling homophobic and anti-Black slurs,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.
Sibley, 28, was a gay Black man, while Popov, who was 17 at the time of the killing, is white. Popov, who was tried as an adult, faces up to 25 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 30.
The reporter, Rob Tornoe, went out of his way to tell us that there was a racial aspect to the killing. More, as the newspaper has been celebrating homosexual “Pride” month, Mr Tornoe had to tell us that the victim was homosexual. I’m not certain how Mr Sibley being black or homosexual makes him either more or less dead.
I do not celebrate the conviction of Karmelo Anthony, because he is a young man who had his whole life ahead of him. He got stupid, killed another young man with his whole life ahead of him, all due to a fight which should never have been a fight. Austin Metcalf is stone-cold graveyard dead, and Mr Anthony, when he gets out of prison in 17½ to 35 years will be a hardened criminal, with no future other than the next crimes he’ll commit. He’ll wind up back in prison, or dead.
The conviction was necessary, but no one is better off for it.
