The Rape and Murder of Karina Vetrano

On August 2, 2016, 30 year-old Karina Vetrano went for a run.

It’s the last time that her family would see her alive.

While going for a routine jog in a park in her Howard Beach neighborhood in the borough of Queens, New York, she was viciously beaten, raped vaginally and anally, and then strangled to death.

It would be months before the NYP would find her rapist and killer, 20 year-old Chanel Lewis of Brooklyn.  Lewis told police: “She didn’t do anything.  I was just mad at the time.  I beat her to let my emotions out. I never really meant to hurt her. It just happened.”

As I write this, it is exactly one year later to the day that the Vetranos lost their Karina. Of his family’s emotional condition as of the first anniversary of the unthinkable, the slain woman’s father told Fox News: “We’re not doing good, we’re not doing well at all.”  He added: “Other than the fact that we lost our daughter, and our lives have ended, no, nothing else has changed.”

Notice, it isn’t just Karina’s life that has been taken.  From the perspective of her parents, in losing their child, and, doubtless, losing her to a monster, they in a very real sense lost their own lives as well.

Commentary on this tragedy and outrage has been revealing, a painful reminder (as if we needed any) of the near omnipresence of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC).

First, even though Karina was white and her attacker black, no one, including her grief-stricken parents, has publicly spoken a syllable to the brute fact that this was but another brutal black-on-white attack.  Those outraged over this obscenity should have done so.  Still, the reality is that they have not.

Second, the only people that have publicly noted the interracial character of this horrific crime have been the agents of the Racism-Industrial-Complex.  And when they have spoken to this dynamic it has been in order to highlight the “racism” of . . . . the victim’s defenders!

The quintessential illustration of this diseased phenomenon is a commentator, self-styled “civil rights activist,” and proponent of Black Lives Matter.  His name is Sean King and he also writes for the New York Daily News.   King purports to be black, though it takes a Google search all but seconds to discover that there is much debate over the authenticity of his racial self-identification.

Ultimately, however, King’s racial background is irrelevant, for the wheels of RIC are greased by people of all races and King’s remarks could have been authored by any of RIC’s agents.

In an article with the headline, “Our Paper and Our City Must Demand Justice for Karina Vetrano Without Slipping into Racism,” King, while extending his sympathy to the Vetranos, expresses “concern that latent racism is now creeping its way into how this case is being talked about — including by my own paper.”

As proof of his paper’s “latent racism,” King cites its cover from February 6 of this year: “Demon in the Weeds: Woman-hating brute, 20, murdered park jogger, Karina.”

This is what King and, to hear him tell it, legions of his Twitter followers, submit as proof of the paper’s “racism.”

Notice, although there isn’t a single racial reference to either the perpetrator or the victim — there should have been, and there most definitely would have been had the racial roles been reversed — King and his fellow travelers in RIC see the headline as “racist.”

“By calling Chanel Lewis ‘a demon’ and ‘a brute,’ the headline devolved into language that has been used to dehumanize and even lynch black men in America for the past century.”

Do all of you latent racists get this?  Even if it is for the sake of characterizing a man who savagely pummeled, raped, and murdered with his bare hands a woman who he didn’t even know, if he is black and you (a white person?) call him a “demon,” a “brute,” and, I’m sure King would agree, a “thug,” you are a “racist.”

That this constitutes “racism” in 2017 for King tells us much about his frame of mind and that of the Industry that he represents.

To add insult to injury, King then launches into a diatribe on the “ugly history” of the victim’s neighborhood, its history of — what else? — “racism!”  King’s argument here is no less telling, and no less weak, than his argument against his employer’s headline.

(1) King alludes to an incident from over 30 years ago that occurred in Howard Beach.  Some black guys from Brooklyn were in the neighborhood when a fight broke out with some of its younger, white residents. One of the blacks, Michael Griffith, was killed by a car while running from his pursuers.

“To this day, fair or not,” King tells us, “the murder of Griffith and the brutal beating of one of his friends, shapes how many in the city see Howard Beach.”

First, Griffith was not “murdered.” The defendants did not kill him; the motorist who inadvertently struck him did.  The jury convicted the defendants of manslaughter and the motorist had no charges filed against him.  The grand jury that convened a year later refused to return criminal charges against the driver.

Second, King’s comment is another insight into the glaring hypocrisy, insensitivity, and arrogance of RIC merchants: At one and the same time, King waxes indignant over what he takes to be the unjust stereotyping of black men while endorsing the stereotype of a whole (white) community that took flight from a single incident that transpired 31 years ago.

(2) “Even though more than 75% of voters in Queens voted for Hillary Clinton, Howard Beach, and many enclaves around it, are [is] Donald Trump country.”

The majority of Howard Beach residents voted for Donald Trump. Thus, they are “racist.”

(3) Howard Beach has long practiced racial “segregation,” for to this day, blacks constitute “just 2% of the population there [.]”

If there are relatively few blacks in an area, this is proof that Jim Crow is alive and well.

The evil that was visited upon Karina Vetrano and her family by a black man who felt the need to leave his predominantly black neighborhood in Brooklyn and search out a white community for a white woman that could serve as an outlet for his alleged hatred of “women” is heartbreaking and outrageous enough.

The intellectual and moral poverty of the Sean Kings of the world only serve to compound the pain.