Jerrys Ink THIS IS FOR YOU, ANGEL ROJAS By Jerry Della Femina Im so sorry youre dead. Im so sorry that you were shot in the back of the head while you were innocently sitting in a crowded New York City bus in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Just reading about you in the tabloids gave me the impression that you were a good man. You had two jobs, worked a 12-hour shift at a fruit and vegetable market, then came home to rest for few hours and off you went to your second job in a deli. When I read about you I thought of my dad, who worked three, sometimes four, jobs so his family could make it through some hard times. As an immigrant from the Dominican Republic you worked hard so that your family could live the American Dream. I want to apologize to you because our Mayor, Bill de Blasio, couldnt find the time to visit your wife and kids to console them. The Mayor is a busy man. Hes busy keeping his promises. He made a promise to the teachers union that he would kill charter schools. So a few weeks ago he threw some African-American and Hispanic kids and their successful charter school out in the cold, even though it was clear that a charter school education was working better for those kids than if they were in one of our failing public schools. Mayor de Blasio is a big man. Hes 6 foot 5 and he weighs over 220 pounds but you would be amazed at how easily and how neatly he fits into the pocket of the teachers union, whose members are in a life and death struggle with charter schools. Another reason Mayor de Blasio couldnt take the time to console your family, Angel, is because he is busy trying to get rid of the horses and carriages around Central Park that are so much a part of what makes this city wonderful. Its rumored that theres a group of de Blasio donors who have their eyes on developing the buildings where the horses from Central Park are stabled. So when the horses go, the building goes and de Blasio will have kept a promise to another of his supporters. Whats going to happen to the horses de Blasio says he wants to protect? They will of course be slaughtered and 300 of their drivers jobs will disappear. But the real reason your wife, Maria Lopez, and your 12-year-old son Saury and your eight-year-old daughter April will never get to see Mayor de Blasio is because of the way you died, Angel. A 14-year-old named Kahton Anderson, who belongs to a gang called the Stack Money Goons, was sitting on your bus when he spotted some rival gang members from the Twan Family coming onto the bus. Kahton Anderson reached into his pocket and pulled out a 357 Magnum revolver. He fired at the other gangs members. That, sadly, was your last second on earth because a bullet that was meant for one of them went wild and tore through your brain. Thanks to Bill de Blasio, this 14-year-old kid would never have been put through the humiliation of being stopped and frisked and having his gun taken away before he could hurt anyone because Mayor de Blasio campaigned on how he would eliminate stop-and-frisk, a police method that made places like Bed-Sty and Brownsville safe from guns when Mayor Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly were in office. De Blasio once again kept his word to pressure groups so stop-and-frisk, under the de Blasio administration, is a thing of the past. This can only embolden kids like Kahton Anderson. Would stop-and-frisk have made a difference in your case, Angel? Who knows? One thing is sure: the word is out that anyone can carry a gun and not be stopped by a suspicious cop. The only thing that kept the murder rate down this winter was the cold weather. But with summer comes heat, and with heat will come crime and violence. The areas like Bed-Sty and Brownsville, which fought the hardest against stop-and-frisk, will have the most casualties. There will be dead innocent little kids who get into the line of fire and hard-working men and women like you who only want to be left in peace. DeBlasio with his Occupy Wall Street philosophy will never talk about the guilty versus the innocent. He will only talk about pitting the poor against the rich. I hope, for your sake, your wife and kids go back to the Dominican Republic. The American Dream is over for them and the American Nightmare may just be starting for us. This city, under Bill de Blasio, will soon be at war. Angel Rojas, you were one of the first – but sadly you wont be the last – to die in a senseless shooting during the administration of a mayor who will go down as the worst mayor in our citys history. There are those who say despite all the bluster, Bill de Blasio is just stupid. Then there are those who say hes just plain evil. I find myself agreeing with both groups. I think hes both stupid and evil. Im so sorry that you had to die, Angel. -- Dennis J. Fitzgerald
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:02:58 +0000
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