Posted on 12/14/2019 6:16:59 AM PST by Drew68
Five days before 18-year-old Barnard College student Tessa Majors was slashed to death in Morningside Park at the edge of campus, a younger teenage girl was chased into the 118 Deli one block further away.
The younger girl lost her footing as a boy who would prove to be 13 came in after her.
He kicked her on the floor, the woman behind the counter would recall. Situation like that, all I know is I got to call the cops. Once I see something like that, Im calling the cops.
The counterwoman, who declined to give a reporter her name, made the call. She then took a cellphone photo through the deli window of the boy after he rejoined four other young teens out on Manhattan Avenue, two male, two female.
The boy who had kicked the girl wore a black parka with red and white stripes, the hood up. He and his friends had departed by the time police responded.
The girl who had been kicked remained in the store. The counterwoman had been told that the boy and the girl were an item, and she offered her the same advice she would have given in an instance of adult domestic violence.
I told her to speak with the cops, the counterwoman recalled.
The girl did as she was advised. But there wasn't much the cops could do, just as there was not much they could do when another of the teens stole a box of bite-sized cakes from the deli and when they threatened the 67-year-old manager, Rachid Ousaji. He had the audacity to tell them Dont steal and they challenged him to come out from behind the counter, intimating they would do him bodily harm.
They start talking bad; Come over and I will show you, Ousaji recalled on Friday.
The teens had hit the man who worked the counter in the afternoon in the face with a snowball.
They robbing the store, I told them to stop, the man recalled.
The afternoon counterman had made another of many calls of his own to the police in recent weeks.
I call, I call, I call, he reported on Friday. Sometimes, Im shamed to always call 911.
The people who run the deli say the kids often spoke of committing robberies. The woman said she heard some time back that they had robbed somebody in Morningside Park, a block away.
On Wednesday evening, the whole city heard of another robbery in the park, this involving a knife and resulting in the death of Tessa Majors, an incandescent 18-year-old Barnard College freshman from Virginia.
The first thing that came to mind was those kids, the woman behind the counter recalled.
So, the counterwoman was not surprised when the police became the ones to call the deli. A detective said they were looking for a group of teens in connection with the killing.
They said the kids that have been making all the problems here is the same kids, the woman behind the counter later told a reporter.
The detective came and took the device that recorded the surveillance camera footage on the day of the crime.
They said they want the video to see [the teens] all together, the counterwoman said.
At 2:20 p.m., when nearby Public School/Intermediate School 180 let out for the day and the boy who had kicked the girl would normally have been causing more problems at the deli, he was in Family Court, charged with felony murder. He was arraigned as a juvenile rather than as an adult because he was not believed to have actually inflicted the wounds that resulted in the death of Tessa Majors.
Im 13, he replied when asked to state his age.
Detective Vincent Signoretti testified that the 13-year-old had confessed to robbing Majors along with two other teens: a 14-year-old who had also been arrested and a third teen who remained at large.
By the 13-year-olds account as told by the detective, the three teens had considered robbing a man before targeting Majors. The 13-year-old had cast himself as almost a spectator while one of his pals rifled her pockets and the other pal applied a chokehold such as been popular with New York muggers since the bad old days of the 1980s. One of the pals dropped a knife and the 13-year-old said he had picked it up and given it to them. The teen still at large began stabbing Majors, slicing through her down jacket and causing feathers to fly in the air. She had struggled up the steps leading to Columbia University and Barnard. The teens fled in the direction of their middle school and the deli and their homes.
The 13-year-old was remanded without bail.
This time they got themselves into something, the counterwoman at the deli said. Somebody died.
The screen on the wall that usually carries images of the surveillance cameras was blank. The detectives were still checking the footage.
They want to know what time he was hanging around here, make sure it's him and where he was, the counterwoman said.
The superintendent for the apartment building that includes the deli came in. He had often called the police on the 13-year-old and other young teens who seemed to be growing ever more out of control even as the neighborhood itself grew more gentrified.
The neighborhood start picking up, but these little kids the super, 53-year-old Tyrone Singleton, said. The kids out there, no home training, just getting wild. Theyre just getting crazier.
He added, Youd figure itd be an older kid messing with you. No, [its] 12- or 13-year-old kids. What do they know about things? Its just crazy.
The No Trespassing signs he posted in the building mean nothing. He calls the police every other day to have the kids cleared from the lobby and hallways and stairwells.
Soon as the cops leave, they right back, he reported.
The Majors killing struck doubly close to home for him, not just because the murder scene was a block away but also because his own 18-year-old daughter is away at college, attending the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.
I gave my daughter a stun gun, he said. I had to. You got to be careful.
He then said, Im going tomorrow morning to pick her up for the holidays.
He was wearing a proud-dad Plattsburgh hooded sweatshirt and his smile made you think that Majors father would no doubt have been equally thrilled to have his daughter back home for Christmas. Your next thought was of what the holidays will be like for Majors family without her.
Singleton then strode out beneath the blank surveillance screen that has often shown the 13-year-old and his pals in the deli and in the street outside.
A number of very polite young teens came in to buy snacks, suddenly the manifest majority in the absence of the hooligans. They included a 13-year-old girl who gazed at the counterwomans cellphone photo of the boy in the black parka with red and stripes standing outside the deli with his buddies. The girl allowed that she knew the boy, though only through a mutual acquaintance.
She was told the boy had been arrested in connection with a murder and she went quiet for a moment before the enormity of that fact. She then said she had been with friends the day before who had wanted to play basketball in the park only to find it closed off by the police.
They said something happened, the girl now reported.
Question: If that 13 year old boy had slapped a reporter’s butt would he have gone to jail? Just askin....
Pro-lifers always try to make it sound like a tragedy, that so many low-income black women are getting abortions. But if those young women know very well they can't raise a child, and it'll turn out feral, I can't mourn that we don't have a million more Trayvons and Zyairrs every year.
What a sweet looking girl. I dont know whether Im sadder or angrier. I do know that I would feel absolutely zero guilt personally squeezing the life from the low-IQ feral monsters who took her young life.
Yes, I have read similar accounts of the “robber (criminal) as victim” mentality in the past. It generally runs along the lines of:
“The (thing of value) that you have is actually mine and my demand for it is actually just me asserting my ownership of it. If you “resist” turning it over, then you compel me to take it by force and deserve whatever happens to you.”
To me, almost all criminal acts are a form of selfishness: at the very moment of the crime, nothing, but nothing, matters more (to the criminal) than getting their own way. Getting their own way, in and of itself, justifies the goal (criminal act) and every action required to accomplish it.
....” Michelle Obama has the gall to complain that race relations still aint right”....
She pushes ‘diversity’ yet fails miserably to identify the cultural differences between the groups...and the freedom we all have to choose who we want to associate with etc.
They'll eventually process it as disadvantaged black youth lashing out at white supremacy, and sadly, one of the warriors who would have fought for them was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's only a tragedy that they killed her instead of a Wall Street Banker, but it's why we have to dismantle white supremacy, because it endangers all whites. So see, undoing capitalism will save white people too.
That's how they'll process it.
Sadly my guess is her dying thought was how badly she felt for these misunderstood victims of Trumps America and how if her death would somehow wake people up to the horrors of white privilege it was worth it. And no none of her friends have learned a thing. They are probably organizing a vigil to commemorate her death and protest the treatment of her assailants by the racist police. Her parents will probably attend wearing Blacks Matter t-shirts.
Now that an ivory tower academic's own life has been touched will academe suddenly recognize that mollycoddling young criminals makes hardened adult criminals?
My bet?
Inman will virtue signal at the trial and beg for mercy towards the youts who brutally murdered his own daughter.
Depressingly, I think you nailed it.
The old saying “Do you know where your chidren are” ...who they hang with and all that “parents” teach and show by example ‘create’ the outcome by the time kids reach ten yrs. old today and often even younger.
Go ahead and say anything you want, so long as it’s preceded by the words “after the fair trial”.
Then you’re covered, kinda.
That little killer could have been the one to cure cancer but he chose wrong.
So a liberal would be a conservative who hasn’t had a classmate murdered yet?
you’re not alone.
Oprah attempted programs for young black girls here in the US....it failed because the kids didn’t want to do the ‘work’ required to change. Oprah took it to Africa to help girls there who are flourishing and eager to learn.
Now I’m not a fan of Oprah however her experience at trying to help US girls and discovering that the will to learn and apply themselves just ‘isn’t there’ regardless of the approach revealed where the problem is.
I agree. As it is, little Zyairr was pawned off on an aunt and uncle to raise him. No mention where his actual parents are (I suspect mom is a casualty of the streets and dad is unknown).
I lived at morningside and 115
Columbia housing
VT PIZZA and Hungarian Tea Rook nearby on Amsterdam
Morningside park was no go for whites in my day daylight or night either one
St Johns anchors a corner up top
The flats below it to the east were some of manhattans worst back then
Once Italian and then Spanish Harlem and then just black ghetto
That swath had Patsys which was to die for ....a holder over from Italian days and it also had the church where the nuns were raped and desecrated by these animals grandfathers 40 years ago and the bent nose bunch went after them so they turned themselves in
I ran near there but was always cautious plus Im a big man
I was there two summers ago and noticed much of that area had been gentrified...not all but a whole lot
These rats likely came from a block of public housing or SROs not yet converted
Awful shame
I recall seeing whites walking into the park from below headed up to Columbia and by extension Barnard last visit and being surprised
My then girlfriend taught at Barnard
Lots of students live on the other (wrong) side of that park from the schools.
Do I REALLY need to loo?m
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