DA charges NYC bodega worker with murder in self-defense case
Fox News' David Lee Miller reports live from Manhattan on a bodega worker who stabbed an assailant five times in self-defense and was charged with murder.
Chalk this one up as another whopper in the "you cannot make this stuff up" category of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s shameless body of work. Within the progressive enclaves of Upper Manhattan on Friday night, a 61-year-old, hard-working, and unassuming Hamilton Heights bodega clerk, Jose Alba, was somehow charged with Murder in the Second Degree, or "intentional homicide," in the stabbing death of a violent ex-convict who threatened, menaced, and assaulted him. Alba clearly became yet another New York City crime victim when the former felon, Austin Simon, 35, decided to manhandle him for refusing to allow Simon’s girlfriend to take — essentially steal — a bag of potato chips without paying.
The entire incident was caught on the store’s surveillance video, yet Bragg seemingly failed to sense Alba’s right to protect himself from harm. Alba was charged with murder and subjected to a ridiculously high quarter-million-dollar bail package (half of what the DA’s Office requested, but later reduced to $50,000.00 in the self-defense case) and transported to Rikers Island to be housed with real criminals. Welcome to the dystopian hellscape that Alvin Bragg’s prosecutorial discretion has wrought on New York. Is it any wonder city dwellers consider fleeing in droves?
The man Alba stabbed to death was reportedly released on state parole following a 2016 conviction for assaulting a police officer and had been previously arrested for robbery and assault. Shocker! Defendant Jose Alba has no criminal record. Yet, during these upside-down times when progressives insist the cops are the enemy and criminals do not deserve prison sentences, here we are. What kind of message does Alba’s arrest for defending himself send?
NYC BODEGA WORKER FREED AFTER BAIL IN MURDER CASE IS LOWERED, BUT NO CHARGES FOR VICTIM’S GIRLFRIEND
Blistered for his "Day One" soft-on-crime memorandum to prosecutors at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office last January, Bragg has continued to misread the room. The infamous directives he ordered be applied to potential criminal prosecutions remain a laughable treatise on just how the rogue "progressive prosecutor movement" seeks to upend recent successes in crime reduction. This district attorney willingly embraces application of New York State’s disastrous bail reform laws that reward recidivism and give new meaning to revolving-door "justice."
Then-District attorney candidate Alvin Bragg speaks during a Get Out the Vote rally at A. Philip Randolph Square in Harlem on November 01, 2021, in New York City. Democratic NYC Mayoral candidate Eric Adams, state Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Letitia James, Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin, district attorney candidate Alvin Bragg and other party candidates along with district and community leaders attended the rally. ( Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
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Bragg’s refusal to serve as the people’s prosecutor, while coddling criminals and charging those who act in clear defense of self, make him unfit for duty. Unfortunately, DAs in New York State are not subject to recall campaigns. Yet GOP legislators have proposed to change that via constitutional amendment. In the meantime, Republican gubernatorial candidates Lee Zeldin and Andrew Giuliani vow to remove Bragg immediately if they win in November.
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Manhattan hasn’t had a Republican lead its DA’s Office since Thomas E. Dewey left the position 24 days after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Decades of Democratic stranglehold on the Office have seen moderate D’s accede ground to progressives like Bragg. The leftward lurch isn’t working — it is harming a once great city. Change may be the Big Apple’s last great hope.
Folks like Alba and law-abiding citizens in New York City must assuredly think so.