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Jim Olsen: man who survived night of carnage

Jim Olsen lifts his shirt and lets the scars do the talking.
The jagged bolts that intersect under his left arm travel all the way back to the morning of Sept. 25, 1982, when George Banks murdered 13 people, including one of Olsen's best friends.

Olsen would have been number 14.

As yet another stay of execution keeps Banks from the death chamber, Olsen sits at the kitchen table of his Plains Township home and does what Banks never expected when he put the barrel of an AR-15 rifle to Mr. Olsen's chest and pulled the trigger.

He lives to tell.

"It sounded like firecrackers," Olsen says of the muffled gunshots he and his friends heard as they stood across the street from Banks' home on Schoolhouse Lane in Wilkes-Barre 22 years ago.
Inside, Banks was systematically taking eight lives; four belonging to his children. Out in the street, Olsen and his friends stood drinking cans of Genessee beer and debating a trip to Allentown to see The Who the next night.

It was after 2 a.m. Olsen was about to say goodnight to Raymond Hall, Ricky Thomas, Thomas Demillier and Molly McBride when Banks stalked out of his home wearing blood-spattered military fatigues and a T-shirt that read, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
"We didn't see the gun at first," Olsen says. "Then Ray said, 'Hey I know you,' and (Banks) just pulled up the gun and shot him in the stomach.

For the next few seconds, Olsen says, time seemed to stop. Hall, 24, convulsed in the street about 20 feet away. Writhing. Dying. It seemed like a bad dream, until Banks broke the silence.

"He said, 'You won't live long enough to tell anyone about this,'" Olsen remembers. "I had no idea what he meant. I think he thought we knew he had killed all those people in the house, but we didn't."

There was no time to say so. Banks pushed the rifle against Olsen's chest and fired. As he fell to the pavement, Banks climbed into a car and drove four miles to the Heather Highlands trailer court in Jenkins Township. He killed four more people there, including another of his children.

Aside from brief flashes of being loaded into an ambulance, Olsen says he remembers nothing between the shooting and the next day when he woke up in a bed at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville. He had been life-fiighted there after his wound - a five-inch hole in his back - was deemed too grave to be treated in a Wilkes-Barre hospital.

The bullet shredded a lung, shattered two ribs and destroyed Olsen's spleen. His liver and kidneys were also damaged. Ironically, he likely survived because Banks
pressed the gun to his chest. The bullet was a "tumblejacket," a round that spins inside a target, tearing up whatever it touches.
The 20 feet between Hall and his murderer ensured Olsen's friend wouldn't survive.

"They didn't tell me Ray died because they didn't want me to have any more stress," Olsen says. "But I was laying there in the bed and I grabbed the remote and clicked on the TV. The news was on, and I saw Ray's funeral. They were carrying Ray's casket. I knew it was Ray's casket because I saw all my friends carrying it."

It took a year for Olsen's wound to close. His mother cleaned and dressed the ragged hole in his back three times a day.

"When you looked at it, you could actually see inside my body," he says. "You could see my organs. My mom had to see that a few times a day. That's an example of how the whole family went through hell over this."

Although he struggled for years to heal from the shooting, Olsen, 44, is not bitter. He survived, and eventually married Molly McBride. The couple is in the middle of a divorce now, he says, but they have two daughters Olsen counts as blessings.

"He killed 13 people. I was supposed to be number 14, but I lived," Olsen says. "He didn't expect that. When I walked into the courtroom, you should have seen his face. I don't think they told him I had lived. He wasn't expecting to see me."

Anyone waiting for Banks to be executed for his crimes will likely be disappointed, Olsen fears. He has grown frustrated over 22 years of appeals and stays like the one handed down Wednesday.

"I was going to be there," he says, explaining that Gov. Ed Rendell's office invited him to witness the execution. "I wanted to see it. I don't mean that in a morbid way. I'm not like that. But he deserves what's coming to him for what he did to those kids. To kill babies. To shoot a baby in the head. What kind of person does that?

"Get it over with. Why have a death sentence if you're not going to use it? I think it's been so long now that if it didn't happen by now, it's never going to happen."

If Banks is ever strapped to a gurney at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, Olsen says he will be there to look into the cold eyes of his would-be killer a final time.

"I want to look at him one last time before he dies," he says. "I want to look at him the way he looked at me."

Why don`t they send him to France where he can be made an "Honorary citizen of Paris" like cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal. Matter of fact, why don`t we send all of our killers to France..#1. It saves the US taxpayers this BS of supporting killers for over two decades and #2. They can run amok and kill Frogs instead..

Paris names Abu-Jamal an Honorary Citizen

From Times Wire Reports
December 6 2001

The Paris city council has named Mumia Abu-Jamal, as an honorary citizen of Paris. Abu-Jamal has been on a U.S. death row in Pennnslylvania for 20 year. The African Amercian journalist was convicted of killing a police officer in a trial that has caused international controversy

An article on the action of the City of Paris also appeared in Los Angeles Times on Dec.6, Home section page A23

Also see AP report below
December 5, 2001

U.S. Inmate Named Honorary Parisian

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 3:35 p.m. ET

PARIS (AP) -- The Paris city council has named U.S. death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted for the 1981 slaying of a police officer, as an honorary citizen of Paris.

The show of solidarity with Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and journalist, came in a vote Tuesday in the wake of the Nov. 21 decision by a Philadelphia court, which said it did not have jurisdiction over a request for a new trial.

Jean Vuillermoz, leader of the Communist Party grouping on the council, said the decision by the council follows ``alarming news'' about Abu-Jamal. Vuillermoz said Pablo Picasso was the last person to receive the title, which is symbolic, in 1971.

Abu-Jamal argued that his former lawyers did a poor job and that he has new evidence that could clear him. The death row inmate's federal appeal is pending.

Celebrities, death penalty opponents and foreign politicians have rallied to Abu-Jamal's cause, calling him a political prisoner and saying he was railroaded by a racist justice system.

Human rights groups have scheduled a demonstration in support of Abu-Jamal in front of the U.S. Embassy in Paris on Saturday.

International Action Center
web: www.iacenter.org
39 West 14^th St., Rm. 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
fax: 212 633-2889 —
phone: 212 633-6646

Send your comments to webweaver@mumia2000.org

One of the great ironies of this case is that Banks, as a former Corrections Officer, would be one of the few people the Brady types would allow to have firearms if they had their way. They point to this case as one of the few crimes committed over the last 50 years with assault weapons, but do not point out that even under the AWB, Banks would still have been allowed to own one, since he was one of the privileged few.

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 122-123