Tag Archives: #Philadelphia

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Gangland killing over an Instagram post

Kaleem Naseer Roland, mugshot via Pottsville Mercury.

Our good friends at The Philadelphia Inquirer have been doing a series on criminal justice where juveniles are concerned. Part 1 was An outlier on juvenile incarceration, noting that Philly locks up juvies at a rate much higher than other cities, Part 2 is Reforms promised, then abandoned, Part 3 is Womb-to-prison pipeline, noting the not-surprising-at-all fact that kids who bounce around in foster care are far more likely to wind up in jail, and today’s Tracking Teens: Philly is monitoring more kids by GPS than ever.

Well, perhaps, just perhaps, kids in the Philly region really are more likely to be bad kids.

Teen charged with murder in death of Norristown man allegedly linked to a gang feud

Kaleem Naseer Roland is accused of gunning down Tahaj Andru “Pooh” Harrison on May 23. Two other suspects are being sought.

by Robert Moran | Wednesday, June 4, 2025 | 11:02 PM EDT

A teenager was arrested Wednesday and charged with first-degree murder in the Norristown shooting death of a 20-year-old man last month in what authorities said was an ongoing gang feud involving prior killings and anger over an Instagram post.

Kaleem Naseer Roland of Norristown, who turned 16 on Thursday, is accused of gunning down Tahaj Andru “Pooh” Harrison on the 600 block of Corson Street shortly before 9:45 p.m. on May 23, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele said.

Steele also announced that an arrest warrant had been issued for 17-year-old Naseem Worrell of Norristown for first-degree murder in the death of Harrison, and the prosecutor was offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. A third alleged shooter remains unidentified.

Norristown police were alerted to gunfire in the area and found Harrison dead in the rear yard of his residence, where he staggered to before collapsing in front of his mother, detectives said.

No, of course the Inky didn’t include young Mr Roland’s mugshot, but I found it easily on the Pottstown Mercury.

The feud was “an ongoing gang feud involving prior killings and anger over an Instagram post”. And, if they are found guilty, young Mr Roland, and Mr Worrell, and apparently a third gang-banger, are going to spend a couple dozen years locked up — this is Norristown, not Philadelphia, so the city’s criminal-loving, police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, can’t cut him a sweetheart deal — behind an Instagram post.

Neither life without parole nor the death penalty are options, because the accused are juveniles. But, whenever they get out, Tahaj Harrison will still be stone-cold graveyard dead.

There’s an apparent epidemic of just plain stupidity going around the greater Philadelphia area. What on God’s earth could have been so bad on Instagram that three teenagers thought it a wise idea to kill someone over it, thought that he needed killin’ so bad that they were willing to risk spending twenty or thirty or forty years in prison?

Who knows, perhaps drugs were involved, which compromised their reasoning, but stupidity is the base for using drugs in the first place.

So, he’s in a heap o’ trouble, if he’s one of the killers, because he’s just plain stupid.

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Bureaucrats gotta bureaucrat It looks like the Philadelphia School District administration don't want to admit the basis of their problems

We noted, last Friday, the waste case that Martin Luther King High School in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia has become. MLKHS at least has the ‘excuse,’ if it can be called that, of being a school in the depressed East Germantown neighborhood, with 100% of students coming from ‘economically disadvantaged’ families.

But what about a case like this?

One of Philly’s premier high schools is in turmoil, staff, parents, and students say

Enrollment issues, staff divisions and other problems are troubling Philadelphia’s storied High School for Creative and Performing Arts, those inside say.

Continue reading →

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Throwing good money after bad

It was thanks to Robert Stacy McCain that I saw this tweet from the Defender of the Republic.

Britney Spears has a guesstimated net worth of $60 million, according to Forbes, or perhaps a paltry $40 million, estimated by Celebrity Net Worth. The Defender wondered why no one could help a clearly wealthy and attractive woman. I know virtually nothing about Miss Spears, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is that no one has helped her because she doesn’t want to be helped.

Which brings me to the more serious:

Only two people have successfully completed the Kensington ‘wellness court’ so far. The Parker administration wants to expand it.

Nearly two-thirds of the more than 40 people brought before the court since late January have dropped out of treatment within days, and then failed to appear at follow-up hearings.

Continue reading →

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A Philadelphia story 13-year-olds trying to steal a car

It was a brief story, totally Philadelphia in nature:

Two 13-year-old boys were shot in Southwest Philly while allegedly attempting to steal a car, police said

The shooting occurred shortly before 6:15 p.m. in the alleyway between the 5900 blocks of Windsor Avenue and Belmar Terrace, police said.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, February 4, 2025 | 7:20 PM EST | Updated: 9:34 PM EST

Two 13-year-old boys allegedly attempting to steal a vehicle were shot by the owner during a confrontation Tuesday evening in Southwest Philadelphia, police said. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia

It’s been a while since I posted a “Killadelphia” article, but it seems that the City of Brotherly Love, despite a dramatically reduced homicide rate the past couple of years, still likes seeing blood flowing down the gutters.

North Philly teen killed in shooting was a student athlete who had the highest SAT score at Samuel Fels

Another teen, an 18-year-old whom police did not identify, was fatally shot hours earlier on the 6100 block of Vine Street, police said.

Continue reading →

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right

It was seven months ago that we noted The Free Press’ Olivia Reingold‘s article on how oh-so-well-intended “harm reduction” measures were actually hurting the Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia.

(Sonja Bingham’s, a 55-year-old mother of three, and local Kensington activist) problem is not just with the hundreds of drug users camped out in Kensington—her neighborhood in northeast Philly that’s been dubbed ground zero for the city’s opioid crisis. It’s with an ecosystem of activists that call themselves “harm reductionists.”

Those who advocate for harm reduction — a Biden-endorsed policy that prioritizes users’ safety over their sobriety or abstinence — say they’re helping fix the problem. But when I visited Kensington last month, Bingham and almost a dozen other residents told me that the activists are actually the ones causing it.

Even The Wall Street Journal noted what a disaster Kensington has been, and how the city’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating and criminal-loving District Attorney, Larry Krasner, has tried to stymie Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins’ plans to clean up the blighted area, and now we have a new complaint, this time in The Philadelphia Inquirer: Continue reading →

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The Democrats say we need more affordable housing, but look what has happened when they were in charge of it As Ned Stark would say, "Winter is coming."

The First Street Journal reported, on December 5th, just how well the Democrats, whose current cause de jour is “affordable housing,” have done when they’ve actually been in charge of housing. We noted a story and an Editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer[1]Sadly, both stories are now behind a “subscribers Only” paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you’ll just have to take my word for it. showing how a liberally-oriented “affordable housing” landlord ignored conditions in a dilapidate apartment, and the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, noting in the Editorial that:

(Essie) Campbell filed several complaints, but no city inspectors entered her home or issued violations for the appalling conditions inside.

Well, though no one has died due to it, it’s happening again!

The Embassy Apartments, 2100 Walnut Street. Photo via Google Maps.

Some tenants in a Walnut Street apartment building say they haven’t had heat this winter

Some tenants of the 15-story Embassy Apartments say the temperatures in their units were lower than legally allowable.

by Nate File | Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 5:56 AM EST

For some people, being carried in the arms of firefighters is a kind of fantasy.

But for 83-year-old Deborah Diamond, it was misery. On Friday evening, she and the other residents of Embassy Apartments at 2100 Walnut St. were told by their building’s management to evacuate because the city deemed it unsafe after a daylong power outage had disabled the fire alarm system. Firefighters strapped Diamond, who is on hospice care, to a chair and carried her down nine flights of stairs.

“This building is in tremendous disrepair,” she said of the 15-story property built in 1900.

This building isn’t some dump in North Philly, but is located between Rittenhouse and Logan Squares. In my Google Streetscape search, I noticed two very nice nearby townhouses, one with an historic preservation plaque on it, with “Harris/Walz” signs in the windows. 🙂

Even before the outage, some residents said their apartments had not received heat this winter, or weak heating at best. Two residents said they measured temperatures inside their apartments that were far below legal temperatures.

There’s more at the link. The newspaper’s story does not say that there had been previous complaints to L&I which were ignored, but here we have a 15-story apartment building, in a city which has been run by the Democrats since the latter days of Harry Truman’s presidency, just a couple of weeks shy of 73 years ago, and there are stories like this.

More will crop up as the depths of winter hit the City of Brotherly Love, and we hear of fires caused by electric space heaters, and toxic fumes from desperate people using kerosene heaters; this happens every winter.

According to a 2021 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, roughly 30% of the city’s rental units lack a rental license entirely, and only 7% of the city’s rental units are inspected during a given year. This presents a troubling lack of clarity on how many households are renting units that fail to meet basic habitation standards.

There’s no surprise in this. Philly is both one of our oldest cities, so the existing housing stock is relatively old, and our nation’s poorest big city. But that also tells us that the Democrats and their policies for “affordable housing” are just words, not matched by deeds.

References

References
↑1 Sadly, both stories are now behind a “subscribers Only” paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you’ll just have to take my word for it.
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Let’s hope he was locked up before he reproduced

Ameen Hurst, then 16. Click to enlarge.

Using Robert Stacy McCain’s formulation, say hello to Ameen Hurst, and while you’re at it, you can say goodbye as well.

However, unlike Mr McCain’s “say goodbye” bit, young Mr Hurst has not died due to his own stupidity. Rather, say goodbye because this teenaged killer was just sentenced to 55 to 110 years in prison.

Ameen Hurst sentenced to 55 to 110 years in prison for four murders, robberies as a teenager

Ameen Hurst was arrested at age 16 and charged with killing four people. He was sentenced to 55 to 110 years in prison on Thursday.

by Ellie Rushing | Thursday, November 14, 2024 | 4:00 PM EST

By the time Ameen Hurst becomes eligible for parole, he will be an elderly man — nearly three-quarters of the way to 100 years old, and nearly five times the age he was when he committed the crimes that landed him in prison.

For shooting and killing four people, robbing two convenience stores at gunpoint, and then escaping from prison while awaiting trial, Hurst was sentenced Thursday to 55 to 110 years in prison. The sentence surprised even veteran Philadelphia prosecutors — Hurst, after all, was just 16 when he committed the crimes.

Continue reading →

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Aspiring rapper update

The “aspiring rapper” headline of this article was inspired by my good friend Robert Stacy McCain’s series of the same name, which occurred to me when I saw the following article in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Two more YBC rappers are accused of murder. One said he was at the shooting but didn’t fire a gun.

Rappers and YBC affiliates Quamere Hall, a.k.a. Mere Pablo, and Mark Johnson, a.k.a. Yak Yola, are facing murder charges.
by Ellie Rushing | Wednesday, November 14, 2024 | 4:58 PM EST

Quamere Hall doesn’t deny that he was at the scene of the slaying of Sharif King, his attorney said Wednesday — he just didn’t fire the guns that killed him.

His friend and fellow rapper Mark Johnson, on the other hand, is another story, Hall told detectives.

So, “fellow rappers” have no real loyalty to each other? Bit shocker there! Perhaps young Mr Hall’s lawyer should have told him that it doesn’t matter which one of them actually fired the gun; if they were engaged in the commission of another felony, they can both be convicted of second-degree murder in the Keystone State. Continue reading →