for BigTrial.net
At 9:07 p.m. on Thursday night, cops in the 14th Police District responded to a call for help involving a "person with gun."
When cops arrived at the 6000 block of E. Wister St., they found a black female sitting in the front seat of a 2014 Ford Fusion suffering from a gunshot wound to the head. She was transported to Albert Einstein Medical Center in critical condition. Surveillance video from the crime scene showed that the woman was not caught in a crossfire, but was targeted for death.
She died at 11:49 p.m. Friday at the hospital, becoming the city's 300th homicide of the year. People are being murdered in the City of Brotherly Love at a rate 32 percent higher over this same time last year. At this pace, the city's murder rate, which totaled only 356 for all of last year, is headed for the highest total of dead bodies since 2006, when the city racked up 406 murders. The all-time record was in 1990 with 497 murders.
You won't read this in The Philadelphia Inquirer, but the blame for the city's escalating violence rests squarely on the shoulders of one man -- District Attorney Larry Krasner.
In an interview on Fox 29 last week, District Attorney Larry Krasner claimed the city's surging murder rate was an "unprecedented national issue," and he blamed "massive unemployment,""terrible poverty," and subpar schools.
In the interview with Good Day host Mike Jerrick, Krasner did everything he could to tap dance around the issue of his office letting so many violent offenders out of jail, so they could kill and maim again.
Sorry, Larry, but let's not forget that it was your office that was responsible for twice letting Razique Bumpas out of jail in the two weeks before he killed a 39 year-old pregnant woman.
The cops issued arrest warrants on Feb. 8 and Feb. 15th on Bumpas, for allegedly making terroristic threats, after he pulled a gun on a woman in traffic. But the D.A.'s office twice declined to prosecute the suspect, asking for more information, such as the accused's phone number as well as GPS numbers that would have placed the suspect at the crime scene.
Less than a week after his second arrest, on Feb. 21st, Bumpas once again pulled a gun in traffic, and this time he murdered a pregnant woman, as well as her unborn child, and he also shot and critically wounded another man.
It was Krasner's office that also was responsible for freeing the two accused killers of Corporal James O'Connor. Two years before O'Connor was murdered, the D.A. negotiated a plea with Hassan Elliott, who got caught carrying a firearm without a license. He only got 9 to 23 months in jail, but walked out of court a free man after the judge accepted as his prison term the amount of jail time already served.
While on probation, Elliott was brought before a judge on three alleged violations of parole. But three times, rather than put him in jail, the D.A.'s office allowed Elliott to stay on probation. When Elliott was arrested on Jan. 29, 2019, for possessing a controlled substance, it was another direct violation of his probation. But the D.A. withdrew the drug charge, and designated it a "Limited Access" case so the press and public can't see it.
A second accused killer, Bilal Mitchell, was arrested twice in February for drug dealing, the month before the murder of Corporal O'Connor. At the time, Mitchell, 19, had three open juvenile cases and one previous arrest as an adult. He was supposed to be wearing a GPS monitor when he was arrested twice for drug dealing.
And what happened next? On Feb. 7th, it cost Mitchell $2,510 to get out of jail; on Feb. 20th, only $2,010. On March 13th, O'Connor, attempting to serve an arrest warrant for murder, was murdered by Elliott and Mitchell, who tried to shoot their way out.
Then, there's Krasner's pathetic record on prosecuting gun crimes, which amounts to a revolving door for armed and dangerous drug dealers who are presently shooting it out on the streets of Philadelphia for control of the local drug trade.
As previously reported, when Big Trial tracked the D.A.'s handling of 236 arrests for carrying illegal guns in July 2019, as of March 16th, the last day the courts were open in Philadelphia, 66 of those cases, or nearly 28 percent, had either been dropped, dismissed or lost by the D.A.'s office.
Of those 236 gun cases, only 37 defendants to date, or 15.6 percent, had been found guilty. And all 37 were the result of plea bargains where every defendant got a sentence well below state sentencing guidelines for gun crimes. Of the 37 plea bargains, 17 defendants either got parole and walked immediately, or they got credit for time served and walked immediately.
Of those 236 gun cases, not a single case to date has resulted in a defendant being convicted by a judge or jury of being guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Of those 236 gun cases, only two cases ever made it to trial, and the D.A.'s office lost both cases.
This is the sorry record that Krasner is doing everything to hide. But here's the bottom of line of Krasner's so-called reforms -- Progressivism kills.
