How you can get killed while driving through the black part of town: a bummed cigarette gone bad

In May we covered the murder of Justin Ferrari of Seattle. While driving with several of his family members to do errands, he had stopped for a light on Martin Luther King Jr. Way when he was shot in the head by “random” gun fire. Meaning that some black was firing a gun at some other black without caring whom he hit, an extremely common occurrence. (For example, in Toronto just a week ago, two people were shot dead and 22 were wounded when, as the CBC reported, “an argument broke out between two men and each pulled guns and began firing wildly into the crowds.”)

Two months later, there is an arrest in Ferrari’s death. Wayne Lutton points out that the below story from the Seattle Weekly has a photo of the suspect, unlike the Seattle Times.

After announcing an arrest in the case yesterday, today King County Prosecutors officially charged 20-year-old Andrew J. Patterson with second-degree murder for the May 24 random shooting death of Justin Ferrari. Charging documents filed in the case this morning reveal what authorities contend was the tragic motive of the shooting: a bummed cigarette gone bad….

Andrew Patterson

In charging documents filed in the case, the King County Prosecutor’s Office says Patterson was in a dispute near the King Deli with another individual over a bummed cigarette when he opened fire from across a street. Police say a stray bullet from Patterson’s gun struck Ferrari in the head as he was driving through an intersection of East Cherry Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way with his parents and his two young children in the car.

[end of article excerpt]

The way police and media always approach homicide, particularly mindless black homicide, is: what was the suspect’s motive? They feel that if they identify the suspect’s motive, no matter how trivial and irrational, they’ve understood and safely classified the cause of the homicide. So they identify phenomena such as that the suspect “was in a dispute with another individual over a bummed cigarette when he opened fire … ” In reality, what caused the homicide in this case was not that the suspect got angry over a bummed cigarette. What caused the homicide was that this was an area where low-level blacks gather, and wherever low-level blacks gather, there is, with predictable periodicity, mindless and “random” black homicide.

- end of initial entry -

Joseph A. writes:

“Charging documents filed in the case this morning reveal what authorities contend was the tragic motive of the shooting: a bummed cigarette gone bad.”

When I read the Seattle Weeklyexcerpt, I had to follow the link to make sure that the above sentence was part of the original story and not an opinionated exposition of the story by one of your readers.

Sure enough, it is in the original. Amazing. As my vulgar friends sometimes say, you can’t make this %*@ up. The press embarrasses itself.

Doug H. writes:

This past weekend, I drove home from El Paso. On Sunday while passing through Houston, I encountered a detour forcing me off the Interstate. The detour signs sent me in a circle. I finally decided to take my chances and drive through the city until I found a route bypassing the Interstate construction. Of course, this sent me into the worst area I could imagine. Fortunately, it was early morning. I only spotted a few locals strolling about. Traffic was non-existent. The area was horribly run down. Each time I encountered a red light, I looked around and ran it causing my wife to exclaim, “Stop this before you get us a ticket!” I told her I would rather get a ticket and hopefully a cop to direct me to the quickest route back on east I-10 than have a hole blown in our heads. That was enough to end that conversation.

By the way, I was visiting my daughter as she gave birth to our second grandchild and first grandson. She like her mother believes there is no higher calling than that of a mother, and this calling is worthy of society’s highest praises.

LA writes:

I pointed to Doug H.’s above comment from a different entry entitled, “A question about obeying traffic lights in Black-Run America.” I’ll reproduce the text here:

Driving with his children and parents through a black part of Seattle, Justin Ferrari, a law-abiding, respectable citizen, stopped for a red light at the intersection of East Cherry Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. While he was waiting at the light, he was shot dead by a random Negro gun shot.

Which raises the question: If you are driving, perforce, through a run-down, black part of town and you come to a red light, what do you do? What would Andrew McCarthy do? What would NR’s twerp-in-chief “Rich” Lowry do?

Here’s what VFR reader Doug H. did.

Paul K. writes:

I find that the rules we have been discussing in regard to our dealings with African Americans provide a useful default response. For example, yesterday afternoon I was walking through the parking lot at the supermarket when a tall black man who looked like a recent Nigerian immigrant asked if I could help him jump-start his car. In accordance with the rules, I murmured something pleasant and kept moving.

Last summer, while waiting for someone at the train station, I let myself be drawn into conversation with a middle-aged black man who started out asking for directions, then had further questions, and finally got around to asking me for $25 for “bus fare.” The whole interaction was a ruse, an effort to develop enough of a relationship that I would be uncomfortable saying no when he hit me up for money. I told him to go away and that I resented him wasting my time.

It’s simpler now that I have assimilated the rules. It wouldn’t have surprised me if helping out the Nigerian would soon lead to a request for “gas money.” I’m sorry to have to be wary of a specific group of people, but who made me that way?

LA replies:

Paul’s points are taken. At the same time, we should not turn these commonsense rules into some fixed negativity toward black people. For example, the other day in the early evening, as I was walking onto an “island” in Broadway in order to sit down on the bench and do some reading, a nice-looking black family group was walking through the island in the other direction. I smiled in their direction, and as I was sitting down, noticed the man, a light-skinned black man, smiling in a friendly way at me, and I returned his smile. It was a pleasant interaction. A world in which there are such pleasant human interactions is better than a world without them.

Which does not take away from the general advice to be cautious and alert.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 24, 2012 01:22 PM | Send