“You can hear Charles Johnson’s skull and facial bones being beaten in with each of the 19 blows his murderer deals out in a bystander video taken last month on a rain-soaked Chicago street,” Charles Glawe writes at thedailybeast.com. Click here to watch the video if you like. If you don’t like, here are the gory details . . .
“The murder weapon—a glass liquor bottle—breaks only when Johnson’s killer has had enough and smashes it on the pavement next to the dying man’s head.
“Damn!”is all one of several bystanders says as the deadly beating plays out at rush hour on a Monday night.” . . .
As Johnson’s killer keeps hitting, and hitting and hitting and hitting him, cars pass and people walk by on both sides of the street. In that sense, the killing recalls the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, when a young woman was raped and murdered in her apartment when, at least according to a famous New York Times account, 38 New Yorkers ignored her screams.
At least one other bystander can be seen in the recording this February in Chicago pulling out a phone to record the killing, which remains unsolved; the suspect hasn’t been identified and is still on the loose, police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. Police and paramedics arrived soon after the video ended, and took Johnson to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
For some reason, Glawe reckons the slaying reflects the number of gun-related gangland murders in Chicago, inspired by “a lawless police department that unfairly targets people of color.”
What he doesn’t mention: that not one of the civilians on scene had the best tool for defending innocent life…a gun.
OK, I’m presuming. But we’re talking about Chicago, a city justifiably famous for degrading and destroying its residents’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.
Question: if you saw this happening, would you intervene? I would. But if I was in Chicago, I’d be disarmed. My efforts to protected innocent life would be far more dangerous and far less effective than they’d be here in Texas. FWIW.