S.I. Rampage Raises Issue of Bias Crime

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: NYT

Aurora Mendoza was just closing up the pizzeria where she works on Port Richmond Avenue on Staten Island when she heard the sounds of destruction late Sunday night or early Monday. She peered outside and saw a man, visibly agitated, swinging a hammer at the storefront next to hers.

“We were nervous,” she said on Monday. “Before we knew it, he got into a red truck and started driving into the front of the store,” a hair salon and gift shop.

Other witnesses said that they saw the man ramming his pickup truck into two other storefronts, a grocery store and a restaurant, a couple of blocks away. Because all three businesses cater to a Mexican clientele and have different owners, some community leaders feared that the rampage was motivated by ethnic hatred.

However, a spokesman for the New York City Police Department, Paul J. Browne, said that by Monday evening, the case had not been classified as a hate crime. The destruction occurred along a stretch of Port Richmond Avenue, on the north shore of the island, where Mexican-oriented businesses have appeared in recent years, rejuvenating a once-ghostly retail corridor.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/nyregion/19staten.html?bl&ex=1219291200&en=821fa71a1e16176c&ei=5087%0A

[elleng]

1. Sounds like an 'insanity' crime to me.

'Motivated by' whatever wouldn't seem to matter.

[Pilotguy]

2. Does Lou Dobbs have an alibi?

[jeff30997]

3. "the case had not been classified as a hate crime."

So the weirdo picked 3 businesses at random and got "lucky"? :puke: