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.

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?