Free Republic

The United States is on track to record its lowest murder rate in more than six decades – a major public safety milestone under President Donald Trump’s leadership. New data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shows that the murder rate is plummeting nationwide. According to the Real-Time Crime Index, the number of murders in the country has dropped by 21.6 percent compared to the same period in 2024. In early May alone, murder rates fell 31.6 percent in Baltimore, 34.5 percent in St. Louis, 36.8 percent in Cleveland, 63 percent in Denver, 30.6 percent in New Orleans, 26.8...

CHP investigators have confirmed that the two men found in the back of a pickup truck in the Santa Cruz Mountains earlier this week were murder victims. Both victims are from Boulder Creek, and the identity of one of the men has been confirmed as 45-year-old Sean Pfeffer, according to his sister, who spoke with Action News 8 by phone from Texas. "It's awful just knowing that he was in the back of an abandoned truck and that's not where obviously the murder was. So somebody had to put him in the back of the truck, you know, Was he...

New York -- A 56-year-old Indian-origin man and his 24-year-old daughter were shot dead at a convenience store in the US state of Virginia and police have arrested one person in connection with the shooting, according to media reports. Pradipkumar Patel and his daughter were working at the store on Lankford Highway in Accomack County when the shooting incident happened. Accomack County is located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.The Accomack County Sheriff’s office said deputies were called to the scene shortly after 5:30 am on March 20 on reports of a shooting victim, Shore Daily News reported. When they...

(The Center Square) – For the 13th consecutive year, the city of Chicago once again reigned as the nation’s homicide capital in 2024 with 573 murders. Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski views that as a sickness he argues has been allowed to fester for too long. Even as overall murder rates across the country dipped, Chicago also claimed the top spot for highest murder rate per capita among big cities at 21.5 per 100,000 population, or three times the levels of Los Angeles and nearly five times of New York City. “It means we have a real problem and we're sick,”...

A New Mexico lawmaker whose son was murdered by a juvenile expressed outrage this week after her criminal justice bill was tanked in favor of what some on the right are calling a "homicide scholarship" program. State Rep. Nicole Chavez of Albuquerque said Thursday she is "sickened" by the developments. "New Mexico Democrats voted to hand offenders like my son’s killer $2,000 a month—some twisted reward for shattering my family," Chavez said of the "homicide scholarship" moniker first dubbed by state Rep. Rod Montoya, R-Farmington, earlier this month. That bill [HB-255] would provide a monthly stipend for certain former convicts...

A key safety system was turned off in a US army helicopter when it crashed into an American Airlines flight last week, killing 67 people. Ted Cruz, the chairman of the Senate commerce committee, told reporters that the Black Hawk helicopter had switched off an advanced surveillance technology known as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B). “This was a training mission, so there was no compelling national security reason for ADS-B to be turned off,” Mr Cruz said on Thursday, following a briefing from federal transport bodies.

A suspect was arrested in his nursing home last week for the unsolved murder of a 16-year-old student nearly half a century ago.Nearly five decades after her partially clothed body was discovered on the second floor of her Honolulu high school, modern DNA testing has led to an arrest that could solve the cold case murder of 16-year-old Dawn Momohara. Momohara, discovered with an orange cloth wound tightly around her neck, was found on the second floor of the English building at McKinley High School in Honolulu on March 21, 1977. She was a sophomore at the school at the...

The mysterious duo who were pulled over in Coventry, Vt. in the deadly shootout are leftist trans militants with alleged ties to a trans terror cell allegedly involved in three other homicides. On Inauguration Day, the shocking news that a US Border Patrol officer had been shot dead near the Canadian border in Vermont in an incident involving a now-deceased foreign national was overshadowed by coverage of Donald Trump's events in the nation's capital. One week later, a 21-year-old Washington woman was charged over the deadly incident, but little has been reported about her and her deceased accomplice, a German...

Fragments of 10 to 20 human skulls have been discovered in a burned-out house in a small town in New Mexico, raising unsettling questions about who the bones belonged to and how the people died, investigators said this week. The Lea County sheriff, Corey Helton, said that the bones had been discovered this month inside a dilapidated property in Jal, N.M., which is home to about 2,200 people in the arid southeastern corner of the state, by the Texas border.

The FBI has quietly changed 20 years of homicide data from 2004 to 2023. Professor John Lott has published an article showing the FBI’s revised homicide data for 2022 and 2023. The previous numbers fed Biden/Harris administration talking points. A close look at the data shows the FBI “adjusted” the homicide data from the last two decades, not just the last two years. The largest adjustment outside of 2021 and 2022 happened to the data from 2005. As of 2006, the total number of homicides reported by the FBI for 2005 was 16,740 for 2005 and 17,034 for 2006. In...

A linchpin of the argument of those who favor a disarmed population is the assumption that “More Guns = More Crime.” It was succinctly stated as an assumption in a recent paper. Psychopathy, Gun Carrying, and Firearm Violence: Carrying guns increases the risk of injury and death…This is a hotly disputed assumption. Several papers dispute the premise. If carrying guns does not increase the risk of injury and death, the pragmatic argument for strict restrictions on gun ownership and use collapses. There is some evidence that if guns are restricted in a draconian manner, homicides with guns may be reduced....

The United States Virgin Islands exists as a United States territory. As an entity that is not a state, it has higher rates of homicide than any state. The homicide rates for the US Virgin Islands are about 7.8 times as high as the average homicide rate for the United States. It has one of the highest illegal homicide rates in the world.Extreme restrictions on the ownership and use of firearms in the US Virgin Islands are more restrictive than in any state since the implementation of the Bruen decision by the Supreme Court. The Bruen decision was published on...

The Atlantic is facing intense scrutiny over a report alleging former President Trump disparaged a slain Mexican-American Army private while he was in office, with some involved with the story declaring it "false" and a "hit piece." Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, began a lengthy report published Tuesday about Trump's interaction with the family of 20-year-old Vanessa Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants who was murdered in April 2020 by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood. After her remains were discovered two months later, Trump consoled Guillén's family at the White House and offered to provide financial assistance to...

Authorities in Montana say a 911 caller discovered his friend dead in a tent in what appeared to have been a fatal bear attack — but officials soon discovered the camper was actually the victim of a brutal murder. Dustin Kjersem, 35, was found dead in his tent on Saturday morning along Moose Creek Road north of Big Sky, Montana, Gallatin County Sheriff Dan Springer said at news conference Wednesday. A friend who was supposed to have met Kjersem went searching for him when he didn't show up as scheduled on Friday. The friend ultimately discovered Kjersem's body in a...

The owner of a luxury $1.8 million Hamptons vacation rental where two Maryland sisters died in a fire sparked by a shoddy electrical job has pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. Peter Miller, 56, admitted to building an illegal outdoor kitchen that overloaded the electricity system of his $ 8,000-per-week pad in Sag Harbor — killing Jillian Wiener, 21, and her 19-year-old sister Lindsay as they vacationed with their terminally ill father in August 2022, Suffolk County prosecutors said Monday. His wife, Pamela, who managed the popular summer rental, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment.

On January 9, 1980, 25-year-old Susan Leigh Wolfe enrolled at the University of Texas Austin School of Nursing. On the same day, at about 10 p.m., she was kidnapped about one block from her home while walking to a friend’s house after having her house sprayed for bugs. A witness to the kidnapping watched as a car stopped and the driver exited grabbing Susan in a ''bear hug,'' placed a coat over her head, and forced her into the car. The witness also said that the passenger door opened, but he did not see what the passenger did during the...

When the DNC delegates come to Chicago, they’ll be visiting the city that for more than a decade has experienced the most murders in the country. Chicago suffered 617 total homicides in 2023, marking the 12th year in a row it has led the country.And it will be 13 years in a row if Chicago’s 2024’s homicide numbers continue at their current pace. The below chart shows how the top five cities nationally for total homicides may change from year to year, but what always remains true is Chicago’s position at the very top – often the extreme outlier.That’s just...

A watchdog group is escalating its battle with the Justice Department over the FBI’s refusal to turn over files on Ashli Babbitt, the United States Air Force veteran shot and killed during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot over the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump. Judicial Watch, claiming a “cover-up,” on Friday filed a suit in federal court claiming that the FBI has twice refused to comply with Freedom of Information Act demands for any files it has on Babbitt and her husband Aaron. The FOIA lawsuit was filed with the U.S. District Court...

The Google engineer charged with murder last week admitted to beating his wife to death with his fist in their $2million Santa Clara home, court documents obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com reveal. Police noticed that suspect Liren Chen’s right hand was ‘extremely swollen and purple’ and that he had blood on his clothing, legs, arms and hands, records reveal. When fire department personnel asked the 27-year-old how he hurt his hand, he replied, ‘I punched my wife,’ and told them it happened the prior day, records state. A friend of Chen told police he’d seen Chen with his wife Xuanyi Yu...

A man has been charged with murdering his Google Engineer wife after he was found 'staring blankly' into space with her dead body nearby. Police arrested Liren Chen, 27, who also works for Google, on January 16 at a home on Valley Way, Santa Clara. He has been charged with murder but his arraignment was postponed after he was hospitalized. Chen was found 'spattered with blood' with an 'extremely swollen and purple arm' kneeling outside a bedroom where his wife was 'deceased on the floor'. His wife, thought to be Xuanyi Yu, had 'severe blunt force injuries to her head',...