There Is Nothing So Cruel...

There is nothing so cruel as broken glass to the foot of an innocent child.

Yet in one of the places you might least expect to find broken glass, there is broken glass a-plenty.

Not a pretty sight nor sensation. So let's take a photo tour through the broken glass zone of Aspen Hill Local Park.

Astute readers will recall that cleaning up local parks is a longtime interest of mine. A clean park being enjoyed by the intended users is a safe park, and perhaps also a clean one.

Case Closed? Charges Dismissed

Today's Gazette brought news that murder charges have been dropped against Detric Lewarren Thompson, 28, in the beating death of Aureliano Evelio Miranda-Fuentes.

I mentioned this in my posting at this entry. Evidently, in some sort of "rush to justice", a police charging document accusing Thompson of murder made allegations of purported racial animosities against "Hispanics" as the motive. Apparently he is alleged to have said he targeted a particular apartment where he was arrested for burglary because Hispanics were "taking all our jobs". The murder in question took place in the same apartment complex some weeks earlier.

Today's Gazette article points out that while the investigation of the murder continues, Thompson is not being charged with that, though he still faces a trial for the alleged burglary.

This case was so incendiary because to some parties it appeared that the police and law-enforcement community were willing to sacrifice a citizen from one "ethnic community" (or at least what remained of their reputation) to placate certain element of another "ethnic community" that tends to accuse the law-enforcement community of looking the other way while they are victimized.

There's enough victimization going around without the police needing to throw anyone to the wolves. And with the dismissal of murder charges, the investigation moves on, ideally to identify and bring to justice the actual perpetrators.

My Goodness, the Gazette Regains Its Integrity

The yanked article on increasing numbers of day-laborers congregating at impromptu non-CASA pickup sites has been restored, at a different location.

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In an entirely unrelated article, the Gazette reports on allegations of prosecutorial and police fabrications of racism as motive for murder:

[...]
[Detric Lewarren Thompson, 28,]'s parents believe that Montgomery County Police have pinned the beating death on their son as retribution for him having avoided two other drug prosecutions last year, and said Thompson lives in Frederick County.

Acknowledging his son’s criminal record, Thompson’s father, Leo Thompson, is adamant that his son would not turn to violent crime, and is especially outraged by the suggestion that his son said he was targeting Hispanics in the burglary, as described in police charging documents.

When Thompson was arrested on March 8, he admitted to breaking into the apartment and to being on drugs, according to charging documents. The documents state that he told the arresting officer that he broke into the apartment ‘‘because Hispanics live there and I hate them. They are taking all our jobs.”

‘‘The Montgomery County Police Department has created a situation that’s racist. It’s racial and everything else you can imagine,” said Leo Thompson. ‘‘That whole thing makes it sound like we’re trying to start a race war. They made it up. And they did it so they could put somebody to a damn crime.”
[...]

Time will tell and a jury will decide as to the guilt or innocence of Detric Lewarren Thompson, in the matter of the Feb. 17 murder of Aureliano Evelio Miranda-Fuentes.

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Moving right along, despite the statements in a recent candidate's forum event, by the Washington Post's endorsee for the office of County Council, District 4, more or less to the effect that "gangs are just children who like to dress funny and pretend to be dangerous", the Gazette reports on an allegedly gang-related shooting incident at Albert Einstein HS in Wheaton. An accidental discharge of a weapon brought to the attention of authorities that multiple handguns had been brought to school...

[...]
Five of the six students were charged. A 14-year-old boy, a 15-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl, all from Silver Spring, were charged as juveniles. The 15-year-old boy was charged with first-degree burglary, theft over $500, reckless endangerment and a series of handgun charges, including unlawful possession of a regulated firearm with ammunition by a minor. The 14-year-old boy was charged with the same handgun-related charges. He was not charged with burglary or theft. They were taken to the Alfred D. Noyes Children’s Center. The 15-year-old female was charged with conspiracy to commit burglary.

Einstein students Jose Ramos, 16, of the 2500 block of Weisman Road in Silver Spring, and Geovani Lazabara, 17, of the 3900 block of Isbell Street in Silver Spring, were charged with three counts each of possession of a regulated firearm and possession of a regulated firearm by a minor, and one count each of illegal sale of a regulated firearm, carrying and⁄or transporting a handgun about their person, and carrying and possessing a handgun on public⁄school property.
[...]

(Lazbara, interestingly enough, lives in the exact same smallish neighborhood -- Connecticut Avenue Park, just south and east of Aspen Hill's Wheaton Woods neighborhood -- which was for a while home to Serial Bank-Robbing White Supremacists Richard Lee Guthrie and Peter Kevin Langan back in the 1970s. No reasonable person would even think of establishing a linkage, this is just co-incidence... or a neighborhood with deep problems.)

Allegedly the guns were to be delivered to one Raul Garcia, 20, of the 12000 block of Centerhill Street, just across Connecticut Avenue and a few blocks down the road, in the Connecticut Avenue Estates neighborhood. Garcia allegedly would find customers for the stolen firearms.

Allegedly, all of the individuals involved have ties to two different gangs.

The Washington Post coverage of the story is rather more detailed, says that police reported that there had been a fight near Einstein last week which took on aspects of a racial fight, and unsubstantiated rumors have been circulated that this was shaping up to be a gang war between elements of the Mara Salvatrucha -- an exceptionally violent transnational criminal organization with roots in Los Angeles and El Salvador, mostly notable for hacking people with machetes and for making friends and gaining the trust of their intended victims -- and an unspecified local African-American gang.

According the the Post reporting, police indicated that the handguns were burglarized "to make money". Astute readers may reasonably conjecture that the alleged burglars knew that people were looking to buy guns, and felt they could profit by serving a need. One may also reasonably suspect that other guns may already be wending their way to Wheaton -- as if there was any shortage of them there -- to find a ready hand to aim them at a fellow student at Albert Einstein HS, one of the most poverty-enrolling schools in Montgomery County.

Illegal Aliens? I Don't Support Them.

My name is Thomas Hardman, and I ran in the last elections for MD District 19 Delegate. I lost. A major part of my platform was "no driver's licenses for illegal aliens". I am running again, this time for Montgomery County Council District 4's seat, vacated by the recent untimely demise of Marilyn Praisner, a lifelong and dedicated civil servant who was the longest-serving council member ever.

There's a lot of competition for her seat, but I believe that I am the only person who will come right out and say "I will not vote a cent for CASA of Maryland".

I have been traveling to Annapolis to testify on this and related issues since 2002. The attacks of September 11 2001 made it absolutely clear that documentation security is an essential prerequisite of national security. Yet Maryland continues to give driver's permits and state ID to persons who are illegally present in the US. Furthermore, the county policies in places like Montgomery blatantly put out the welcome mat for illegal aliens, and embolden the unscrupulous employers who intentionally pass over legitimate potential employees so that they can pad their own pockets with ill-gotten gains while foisting the social costs of onto the taxpayer and society.

I live in Aspen Hill. I have attended a variety of CEO "Ike" Leggett's Town Hall Meetings and have asked him directly about these day-laborer centers, especially after he slapped one into place in Gaithersburg under slipshod and questionable process which skirted the law.

When we questioned him about what he would do about the crowd of a hundred or so day-laborers pestering people in the parking lot of Aspen Hill's Home Depot, he said (I paraphrase) "that's the best argument for CASA's centers, it provides orderliness and regularity". But it took a full year, and repeated complaints from both Home Depot and their customers -- victims of aggressive panhandling etc -- before Mr Leggett evidently comprehended his own words enough to order the County's finest to start acceding to public (and Home Depot's) opinion and enforcing the law against criminal violations by day-laborers such as public urination and public intoxication, aggressive panhandling, and criminal trespass on Home Depot's property.

In the course of this sustained police action -- for which I have agitated many years in the course of my involvement in the civic and community affairs of Aspen Hill -- actual progress has been made. The crowd of a hundred morning meanderers has at last been dispersed.

Part of the progress is that the police themselves have come to understand the nature of the problem.

I have been informed off of the record that when the police started checking the credentials of various persons driving vehicles seeking to pick up day-laborers, a very significant percentage of those drivers did not have valid permits. I was not informed about the percentage of such persons whose names were run against the NCIC wants-and-warrants database and came out positive as fugitives, but I also suspect that it was also high.

At long last, from having to deal with this as a syndrome, rather than dealing with it as individual criminal violations scattered across their districts, the police seem to have actually understood the problem. At Home Depot, at least, over the course of 18 months, they watched an actual invasion, one that took over the parking lots of a 7-11 and then a Home Depot across the street from the 7-11.

This is already a dangerous intersection and traffic is restricted from turning, and often in the morning you would see a line of police officers ticketing people who had made illegal turns to enter the parking lot to pick up "day laborers" who were likely illegal aliens. And so the police officers were there to watch the numbers grow and grow and grow, because the word had gone out that the police would do nothing because their orders from the top down were to do nothing to interfere with the day-laborers, so long as they didn't personally witness gross violations of non-immigration law.

Here are photos from the very early days of "the migration":





Astute observers and quick wits will note that my long involvement with and interest in this area included agitating for that fence and keeping it clear. Illegal aliens, thanks to my efforts and those of PEPCO and some elements of the County, will not be sleeping in those woods. Mostly I think they rent rooms in the houses nearby... in my neighborhood.

One officer mentioned ("off the record") that one illegal said "run us off, we will just rob people". And there is a robbery problem here in Aspen Hill. It was here before the gathering at Home Depot and perhaps it will remain. Worrisomely, last summer there was a string of muggings in the area, which weren't widely publicized. Yet in a mere 25 days there were some 70 robberies, mostly of Latin-American men believed to have just cashed checks. This was the so-called "amigo shopping" string of robberies. I do not in any way support violence against anyone, and think that there are much better ways to deal with the fact that for every foreign "day laborer", there's a poor black local citizen who won't be getting that work. Unemployment is practically pandemic in certain local sub-communities and that both contributes to temptations to crime and violence, and outrages me... and many others, as well.

If Elected, I will always vote for order, against crime, and will have only the bare humanitarian tolerance of illegal aliens, and will vigorously oppose those who profit from them.

Gangs In Schools Survey

While researching local issues, I followed a link to the National Gang Crime Research Center's Gangs and Schools Survey (2006).

This was an eye opener. It's a pretty broad survey covering 46 of 50 states, one of which is Maryland.


-- Two-fifths of schools report gang fights near schools.
-- Two-fifths of schools expect an increase in gang problems.
-- One third of schools report gang recruiting near schools.
-- One fourth of schools report a gang shooting near school.
-- One fourth of schools report a drug-related shooting near school.
-- One fourth of schools report "white racist" "extremist" organizations are active near school.
-- One half of all schools report gang graffiti near schools, and this graffiti isn't going away.
-- Three fourths of schools want a gang prevention program.

The finding that worries me the most?

-- Gang disturbances are more common in public schools than they are in state prisons.

The question asked in the survey that seems to me to be most openly weird?

"[H]ave there been any reports of occult-type activities among students in your school during the last year (e.g., dabbling in satanism, witchcraft, odinism, etc)"

You might as well ask "have there been any reports of religious recruitement activities among students in your school during the last year". Or, "have you identified the unbelievers and heretics".

Just say "no" to gangs, just say "no" to racial extremism and hatred, and also just say "no" to intolerance of religion.