Adrun Demetrius Bennett, born February 19, 1998, has managed, in his short life, to become rather familiar with the Fayette County Detention Center. The mugshot to the right was taken on Wednesday, October 6, 2021, after he was captured following a standoff with police:

After an approximately three-hour standoff Wednesday, Lexington police captured a man accused of robbing a Fifth Third bank, police said.

According to police, a first-degree robbery warrant was issued for Adrun Bennett, 23, after an investigation identified Bennett as the suspect in the Aug. 9 Fifth Third Bank robbery on Walden Drive, near the intersection of Tates Creek and Armstrong Mill roads. During the robbery, Bennett allegedly handed an employee a note threatening he had a gun and demanded money. The employee complied and Bennett fled the scene.

Officers found Bennett inside an apartment on Spangler Drive Wednesday morning, police said. Bennett barricaded himself inside the unit for approximately three hours, but Bennett was ultimately arrested without further incident, police said.

There’s more at the original, but the jail records also include three other mugshots of Mr Bennett, taken on January 11, 2021 at 11:37:02 AM; August 30, 2018 at 2:45:34 AM; and February 19, 2016 at 12:39:20 AM, which just happens to be thirty-nine whole minutes after he turned 18. Would it be wrong of me to suspect that he has a sealed juvenile record as well?

Well, he managed to rack up some adult charges:

Two teens charged in connection with robbery of Central Bank on Versailles Road

By Greg Kocher | June 3, 2016 | 2:17 PM EDT

A 16-year-old and an 18-year-old have been arrested in connection with the Thursday-afternoon robbery of the Central Bank and Trust branch, 2347 Versailles Road, Lexington police said. . . . .

Police said they found the juvenile, whose name is not being released because of his age, and the 18-year-old, Adrun D. Bennett, in an apartment on Cambridge Drive.

The juvenile is charged with first-degree robbery. Bennett is charged with tampering with physical evidence for trying to conceal stolen money, police said. Bennett is also charged with two counts of wanton endangerment in connection with shots fired on Appian Way on May 29; the shooting is unrelated to the robbery, police said.

If this fine gentleman was firing shots, then charged with aiding and abetting a bank robbery, the obvious question is: why wasn’t he already in jail? This is not a good dude!

The Lexington Herald-Leader, of course, did not publish Mr Bennett’s mugshot, even though the reporter for the first cited news story, Christopher Leach, noted that he checked “jail records” to ascertain the charges Mr Bennett faced, and had to have seen the same four mugshots that I saw. His article was originally published at 7:21 AM on Thursday, October 7^th, and updated at 4:20 PM the same day, so he had plenty of time to ask permission of Editor Peter Baniak to use the mugshot. Whether he did or not, I do not know, but at some point even the McClatchy Mugshot Policy ought to give way when a multiple-time repeat offender is involved.

When last we reported on it, Lexington had seen 28 homicides in 2021, the last on September 3^rd. Lexington’s 29^th murder happened early this morning:

Update: Man dies after shooting at Lexington apartment complex

By Christopher Leach | Updated: October 5, 2021 | 4:37 PM EDT

A 23-year-old man died shortly after he was found shot at a Lexington apartment complex early Tuesday, according to police.

Jayontai McCann of Lexington died at the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital at 5:17 a.m., according to the Fayette County coroner.

The report doesn’t have much information in it. Just before 4:00 AM, the Lexington Police Department received a call about a man being assaulted behind the Liberty Heights Apartments. When officers arrived, they found the victim, who had been shot multiple times. It’s almost a sick joke to note that the police stated that they were investigating the case of a victim shot “multiple times” as a homicide.

Twenty-nine homicides in 278 days equals one every 9½ days. Due to fractions, the exact number works out to 38 homicides for the year. With 29 murders, Lexington is just one behind the then record of 30, set in 2019, but, of course, the record was broken again, with 34 in 2020. With a population of 324,604 according to the 2020 census, the city’s homicide rate in 2020 worked out to 10.474 per 100,000 population. If Lexington hits 38 homicides, the way the numbers work out, that would be a jump to 11.707 per 100,000, hardly on a par with Chicago or Philadelphia, but bad enough.

However, let’s tell the whole truth here.

Suspect arrested for shooting that injured EKU player

By Echo Gamel | July 24, 2019

LEXINGTON, KY. (WTVQ) – Police announce an arrest in a shooting last month in Lexington that left an Eastern Kentucky Football player injured.

The Lexington Police Department says 21-year-old Jayontai McCann is facing charges for the shooting on June 23 near Two Keys Tavern.

According to officers, two men got into a fight then one went to his car to get a gun and shot the other man.

The victim was later identified as Cameron Catron, a player on the EKU football team.

McCann is charged with assault, possession of a handgun by convicted felon, and tampering with physical evidence.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported^[1]The Herald-Leader actually printed Mr McCann’s mugshot in that story, but it was before the silly McClatchy Mugshot Policy was written.:

According to court records, McCann was on probation at the time of the shooting after pleading guilty in August. He was charged with cocaine possession and attempted evidence tampering. His prison sentence and jail sentence on the two charges were suspended and he was given probation for two years.

He had previously been charged with other drug and gun crimes and pleaded guilty in some instances.

The obvious question is: why was Mr McCann out on the streets Tuesday morning? He had been a previously convicted felon, and had a suspended sentence hanging over his head. He should have been locked up for the two years of his suspended sentence, even before facing charges for shooting Mr Cameron.

Did law enforcement do Mr McCann any favors by treating him leniently? If he had been in prison, where he should have been, he would (probably) be alive today. By letting him loose, loose to return to whatever life he led before, law enforcement left him out to become stone-cold graveyard dead.

The odds are pretty good that, if and when the Lexington Police figure out who murdered Mr McCann, we’ll discover that he, too, had a rap sheet and could, and should, have been in jail himself early Tuesday morning.

The Urban Dictionary defines a “self-cleaning oven” as:

when a criminal becomes the victim of a crime because he victimized someone at an earlier time; in other words, karma comes back on the criminal, the problem takes care of itself without the need for police or legal intervention. In theory, eventually all crime should diminish because of this theory, the oven should clean itself.

“Man, that banger got shot because he jacked those same dudes last week…it’s okay because now his crew will roll back on them…they don’t want to make a police report, it’s a self-cleaning oven.”

On one of my favorite television shows, Blue Bloods, it’s called a public service homicide.

It is, however, possible that Mr McCann was turning his life around, and whatever his past crimes, he didn’t deserve to die. But bad lives can lead to bad ends, whether he was turning his life around or not.

We have expended considerable bandwidth reporting on the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, which has seen 408 homicides in 272 days, an even 1.500 homicides per say, for a projected total for the year, assuming the current rate remains constant, of 548 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards.

But what about Lexington, Kentucky, the closest large city to me, and where I lived from 1971 through 1984. According to the Lexington Police Department, there have been 28 murders in the city thus far in 2021, 28 in nine months of the year. If the rate continues, the city would be projected to see 37 homicides for the entire year. Compared to Philadelphia’s current 408, that doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that 2019 set a city record with 30, which was then topped by 34 killings in 2020, it’s a lot.

Of course, like so many other places, the bad guys are lousy shots. All 28 homicides so far were committed by firearms, which makes the relationship with the city’s reported shootings a tight one. Thus far, the police have reported 101 non-fatal shootings. Looks like the bad guys manage to actually kill their intended targets 21.71% of the time!^[1]With the last reported shooting being on September 19th, the LPD is a bit behind on keeping the data up to date. The Herald-Leader reported a shooting as having occurred “just be fore … Continue reading

The Lexington Police Department keeps statistics strangely. The shootings data include the race of the victims while the homicide chart does not. Of the 101 shootings reported as of September 19^th, 77 of the victims were black, 16 were white, and 8 were listed as Hispanic. According to the 2020 Census, the city’s population was 323,152, and was 74.9% white, 14.6% black, 7.2% Hispanic and 3.8% bi- or multi-racial; the white, black and multi-racial percentages include Hispanics, and while the figures note that 71.0% are non-Hispanic white, the figures do not report the non-Hispanic black percentage.

So, with black Lexingtonians being 14.6% of the population, why have they been the victims in 76.24% of the shootings? And why does the city not show the information on how many murder victims were black? I suspect that it is, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, such would be “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

Sadly, the Lexington Police Department hasn’t been doing too well in solving the homicides. In only 11 of the 28 killings has a suspect been identified. That’s a clearance rate of 39.29%. They did better in 2020, with arrests in 28 out of 34 murders, one of which only resulted in arrests this week.

Lexington’s homicide rate in 2020 was 10.52 per 100,000 population, which doesn’t in any way compare to Philadelphia’s but it’s still way too high. With a guesstimated 2021 population of 324,604, if the city does see that projected 37 homicides, it would mean that the homicide ticked up to 11.40 per 100,000. That’s not a good thing.

We noted, two weeks ago, that the Lexington Herald-Leader declined to publish the mugshots of two murder suspects on the lam. Naturally, The First Street Journal found the mugshots, and yes, we published them!

Well, we are happy to report that Danzell Cruse, the death of 38-year-old Jocko Green, has been apprehended:

Man apprehended in Central Kentucky, charged with a Lexington murder, police say

By Jeremy Chisenhall | July 9, 2021 | 1:43 PM | Updated: 4:14 PM EDT

A Lexington murder suspect has been apprehended and charged with the shooting death of a 38-year-old man, Lexington police said Friday.

Danzell Cruse, 26, was located and arrested Thursday in Frankfort, police said. He’s accused of shooting and killing 38-year-old Jocko Green. Green was found in a parking lot outside an apartment complex in the 600 block of Winnie Street on June 17, police said.

Green was taken to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital after he was shot, police said. He died about three hours later, according to the Fayette County coroner’s office.

There’s more at the original. Mr Cruse was apprehended due to work by the United States Marshalls and the Frankfort Police Department.

The Herald-Leader did not publish Mr Cruse’s mugshot with the current story, but, since he’s now off the streets, I suppose he no longer falls under the McClatchy Mugshot Policy guidelines for an exception to the no mugshot publication rules.

On May 22^nd, I noted the Lexington Herald-Leader article on the killing of Demonte Washington, and subsequently noted that Mr Washington’s killing has not appeared on the Lexington Police Department’s Homicide investigations page.

I was finally able to get in touch with Sergeant Donnell Gordon of the LPD and ask about that; Mr Washington’s killing has been ruled a justifiable homicide. I had searched the Herald-Leader’s website, for subsequent stories on Mr Washington, but there were none, meaning that either the newspaper didn’t pursue the story, or, if informed that the homicide was ruled justifiable, didn’t see it as significant to publish the information.