13-year-old boy arrested for murder of college student in New York City
A 13-year-old boy has reportedly confessed to stabbing 18-year-old Tessa Majors in a park near the Barnard College campus; David Lee Miller reports.
This week’s shocking fatal stabbing of an 18-year-old Barnard College student in New York City may have been prevented if liberals now running the city’s government hadn’t begun reversing former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s anti-crime policies, a former city police commissioner says.
Bernard Kerik, an Army veteran who was head of the nation’s largest police department when terrorists struck the World Trade Center on 9/11, made the comment Thursday, in reaction to Wednesday’s murder of Tessa Majors, a Virginia native who police say was viciously beaten and stabbed by three or four attackers in the early evening in a Manhattan park.
BARNARD COLLEGE STUDENTS 'APPREHENSIVE,' 'SHAKEN UP' AFTER FRESHMAN, 18, STABBED TO DEATH NEARBY
The slaying startled and devastated residents of the surrounding area in addition to Majors’ classmates at Barnard – a private college for women -- and other nearby schools, including Columbia University.
“The Murder of Barnard freshman Tessa Majors is the fault of everyone of the city’s socialist leftist corrupt politicians that’s been part of the reversal @RudyGiuliani’s crime reduction initiatives started in 1994,” Bernard Kerik wrote.
Giuliani, who now serves as a personal attorney for President Trump, was mayor of New York City from 1994 until his final term expired at the end of 2001, just three months after the city’s most horrible day. Even before 9/11 earned Giuliani the nickname “America’s Mayor,” for the way he held the city together during the initial, uncertain days after hijackers killed some 3,000 people, the former federal prosecutor was credited for bringing a sharp reduction in crime to the Big Apple, reversing a safety decline that had plagued the city in the 1970s and 1980s.
Most famously, Giuliani and former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton implemented the “Broken Windows” approach to crime reduction, in which police crackdowns on minor offenses were believed to result in fewer major crimes as well. The plan appeared to work – although critics disputed how much credit Giuliani and Bratton, and successors Howard Safir and Kerik, deserved.
Since Giuliani left office, his successors have been billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who served from January 2002 to December 2013, and Bill de Blasio, who took office Jan. 1, 2014, and remains the city’s mayor.
Bloomberg, now 77, began his tenure as a Republican and later became an independent. He has since switched to the Democratic Party and recently launched a bid for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. As part of that effort, Bloomberg in November spoke at a Brooklyn church where he apologized for implementing an anti-crime policy known as “stop and frisk,” which had angered liberal activists who were concerned about the civil rights of innocent people detained by police and the general constitutionality of the policy.
“Over time I’ve come to understand something that I’ve long struggled to admit to myself,” Bloomberg told congregants at the Christian Cultural Center in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I got something important wrong. I got something important really wrong.”
"Over time I’ve come to understand something that I’ve long struggled to admit to myself. I got something important wrong. I got something important really wrong."
Critics charged that Bloomberg seemed to be attempting to ingratiate himself to the city’s Democrats, now that he was seeking their votes after being a Republican for many years.
De Blasio, 58, an unabashed liberal, also made a run at the White House earlier this year until ultimately dropping out. One of his early moves since taking office was bringing back Bratton – but the pair quickly made changes to scale back the stop-and-frisk policy.
“When commissioner Bratton and I came in, we drove down the unconstitutional stop-and-frisk deeply,” de Blasio told radio station WNYC in 2016.
Around the same time, de Blasio also addressed the issue in a fundraising email, Politico reported.
“Not many people know precisely how much we have reduced the use of stop-and-frisk in New York City,” he wrote, before giving the answer as 97 percent.
“I promised to fix it and we have,” the mayor added.
Wednesday’s slaying of Majors has returned crime to the front and center of local politics.
“The idea that a college freshman at Barnard was murdered in cold blood is absolutely, not only painful to me as a parent, it’s terrifying to think that that could happen anywhere,” de Blasio said after an unrelated event in Brooklyn, according to the New York Daily News.
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The young woman was a member of a band called Patient 0, and had two concerts scheduled for her hometown of Charlottesville, Va., during what was to be her upcoming winter break, the New York Post reported.
As of Friday morning, there was still no information regarding arrests of her alleged attackers – or information about their identities. Two teens were questioned but released, the Daily News reported.
“There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison told the Daily News. “We’re going to need the community to help us with this investigation.”
