This seems to be an under-reported story outside of New York.
It should be national news.
What's more, what caused this brutal murder should be known to everybody who can vote in this country.
A young person murdering a elderly person isn't a man bites dog story, a fact which is too sad to articulate. A young woman committing such a heinous crime is a bit more unusual. It should be known that this wasn't a crime of passion. The murder took an hour or more and involved objects being shoved down the victim's throat along with several stab wounds.
Okay, the fact that there are evil, disgusting people in the world isn't news. Sure, it's not even news, at least for anybody who reads my page, that I know people who were sentenced to just as much time as this murderer was for dropping off a dime bag once as a teenager.
Still, this is a story of a murder that never should have happened, not for the simple reason that it was an act of evil, but because the only reason the murderer was even free to commit the murder is because of dumb policies.
This wasn't the murderer's first run in with the law. It wasn't even her first run in with the law that week. It wasn't even her first run in as a result of a violent crime that week.
New York's bail reform system caused this murderer. Just days before the murder, the murderer committed a robbery and assaulted a seventy-year-old woman in the SAME BUILDING. Before that, she was arrested for stealing and pulling a steak knife on a man who confronted her, and threatened to kill him. This is in a state where, if you raise your arm and get caught with a gun on the metro, you could go to prison for four years. Before that, the murder had non-fatality stabbed a man in the head. She had stolen several cars before the murder.
In almost every case, she was released from jail within 24 hours of the arrest.
This is a problem with policy.
I don't care what your political affiliation is, Kathy Hochul needs to be voted out of office. She won't acknowledge that it's the policies that she's championing that are opening the doors to these acts of evil. This isn't even an isolated incident.
Look, when I was working in the criminal justice reform space in DC, we decided to deliberately use the words "right on crime" to bridge between the tough and soft on crime sides. Tough on crime often, sadly means cruel and unusual punishment against people who broke laws that shouldn't be laws. Soft on crime means looking the other way when evil people do evil things to innocent people. Right on crime means punishing the people who do harm and removing people who have demonstrated that they're dangerous actors from society while keeping people who committed victimless crimes out of the system.