65-year-old man shoots “teen” dead after three “teens” knock him off his bike and assault him

The heartening story of a man successfully using deadly force to defend himself from feral savages comes from NBC Philadelphia, via The Huffington Post. Of course, the race of the “teens” and of their intended victim is not mentioned. Let’s just say, Civilization 1, Savagery 0.

Man Kills Pa. Teen After Being Knocked Off Bicycle: Cops
01/26/2012

A 65-year-old man shot and killed a teenager after the boy and his friends knocked the man off his bicycle and tried to assault him, Pennsylvania authorities say.

Police did not reveal the identity of the elderly man, who they released without charges following the incident on the Thun Trail located in Berks County, the Reading Eagle reports.

According to reports, the senior was biking down the trail when the group of boys—ages 16, 16, and 15—knocked the man off his bicycle and attempted to rob him. The man drew his gun and fired two shots, killing one of the boys and severely wounding another, according to NBC Philadelphia.

Cumru Township Police Chief Jed Habecker told WFMZ that the wounded teen had been taken in for surgery.

The third boy, 15, was questioned and later brought to a county Youth Detention Center on unspecified charges, according to ABC.

The mother of the slain boy requested that her son’s name also not be announced until she could alert family members.

- end of initial entry -

James P. sends a more detailed newspaper account of the same incident. He writes:

The Reading, Pennsylvania, paper reports that three teens knocked a man off his bike. He shot two of them, killing one. No charges are filed against the man.

I’m going out on a limb and guessing the dead teen, Julius Johnson, is black. The third teen, Michael Gonzalez, is doubtless Hispanic.

According to the story:

Johnson was on probation for previous offenses. Juvenile probation officers had gone to his Oakbrook residence earlier Wednesday and found the three teens playing video games.

They told the two 15-year-olds to leave. The officers put an electronic monitoring device on Johnson’s ankle, ordered him to stay home and report to their office with his parents at 4 p.m.

Instead, the three met up and decided to jump and rob random victims. [JP: But they were not “random”—the intended victims were older people and almost certainly white.]

They first robbed an elderly man in West Reading shortly after 10 a.m., taking money from his pockets, then tried to rob another man in West Reading, kneeing him in the stomach and pushing him to the ground. Neither man was hurt.

The bike rider was on the trail between Reading and West Reading.

As he rode past the teens, the 15-year-old whose name was not released punched the man in the face, knocking him from his bike. Johnson ran and kicked the man, who was sitting against a chain-link fence along the trail.

As one of the teens ran toward the man, he shot Johnson and the 15-year-old.

Too bad the whole thing isn’t on YouTube to deter thugs from “happy slapping.”

LA replies:

The newspaper article persists in the silly convention of calling vigorous people in their sixties “elderly,” especially when they are crime victims. In contemporary society, in which 50 is the new 40 (or even, some would say, the new 30), 65 is not elderly. Romney is 64; does anyone call him elderly? Gingrich is 68—does anyone call him elderly?

I remember how 62-year-old Patrick McGee of Manchester, England, murdered and beheaded by a Filipino immigrant, was repeatedly described in newspaper acounts as “elderly” and as a “pensioner,” as though he were useless and on the edge of the grave, so his murder didn’t mean that much. It’s as though modern society, fixated on the atomized, de-racinated self and its desires, youth, and sexual attractiveness, wants people to be seen as irrelevant or almost vanished after they reach sixty.

In this connection, Ayn Rand, the ultimate exponent of the atomized, deracinated self, was so fixated on youth that in Atlas Shrugged she describes characters in their fifties as “elderly.” The novel ends when one of her three main protaganists, Henry Readen, is 48, so he is spared that designation.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 27, 2012 09:43 AM | Send