Another Bogus Racial Grievance

Yes, it’s the “Central Park 5,” five thugs who attacked a jogger in New York’s Central Park, raping her and beating her nearly to death.

Now a Netflix documentary claims they were coerced into confessing. The notion is supported by the fact that one of the guilty thugs, not before linked to the crime, has come forward, been linked to the crime by DNA, and claimed to be the only offender.

But the evidence shows that the five were clearly guilty.

Some of the facts the Netflix documentary will not tell you:

[Attacker] Raymond Santana confirmed his accomplices’ testimony. “He was smackin’ her, he was sayin’, ‘Shut up, bitch!’ Just smackin’ her…I was grabbin’ the lady’s tits.”

[Attacker] Kharey Wise admitted that this “was my first rape.”

Melody Jackson, whose brother was friends with Wise, corroborated Wise’s claim. She said that while Wise was incarcerated at Riker’s Island, he told her by phone that although he didn’t personally rape Meili, he is guilty of having restrained her legs as Kevin Richardson “f**ked her.”

Even more telling is that Melody Jackson relayed this exchange with Wise to the authorities only because she believed that it would assist Wise’s defense. Evidently, she thought (ludicrously) that insofar as Wise admitted to not having forcefully penetrated Meili himself, this would somehow exonerate her friend.

While Santana was in a police vehicle and before he had even been arrested, he abruptly shouted out that “I had nothing to do with the rape!” He added that he had only fondled her “tits.”

At this juncture, the police weren’t even aware that [victim] Meili had been raped.

Two friends of his informed authorities that the day after the attack Korey Wise told them that he and the other four of the Central Park Five were responsible for beating and raping Meili. And when a detective presiding over the case and a prosecutor took Wise back to the blood-soaked scene of the crime, he said that he knew that she had been bleeding. But because it was dark, he had been unaware of just how much blood she had lost.

Thus, he attested once more that he had been present the night Meili was bludgeoned.

Wise also informed police that a person whose name he thought was “Rudy” stole Meili’s Walkman radio. Her radio had been stolen—only at this point, the police had been unaware of this.

Kevin Richardson also told someone that he and his friends had raped a woman.

Tellingly, Richardson was able to show investigators exactly where the attack on Meili occurred. So too did Santana direct them to the location of the crime.

Ann Coulter reminds us of but another inconvenient fact that puts the lie to the narrative that the CP5 confessed to these crimes because Big Bad Blue Men scared them into doing so. “Far from trembling and afraid…the suspects were singing the rap song, ‘Wild Thing’ for hours in the precinct house, laughing and joking about raping the jogger. One of the attackers said, ‘It was fun.’”

One of the other many teens who had been out “wilding” and who was among the ten or so kids to have been arrested that night relayed to the police that he heard Santana and another male teen laughing over having made “a woman bleed.”

Another one, prior to being questioned, told police that he knew “who did the murder.” This is proof that, at the very least, the pummeling that Meili endured was witnessed by multiple people and that its severity was such that it was assumed it was fatal.

People naïve about DNA testing in 1989 might assume that the lack of DNA evidence against other suspects exculpates the Central Park 5. But it does’t. Such testing was vastly less sophisticated in 1989, and assaults that today would leave usable DNA all over the place didn’t in 1989.

Fits the Narrative

As with the case of Michael Brown, or the Covington Catholic Kids, people quickly adopt and fail to question a narrative that fits their preconceptions.

The idea that huge numbers of innocents blacks are locked up because of racist cops and prosecutors is a narrative many love. It gives them a glow of warm self-righteousness.

But the idea that there is a problem of crime and violence in the black community isn’t so nice. It’s good for the ego to be the defender of poor, oppressed black people. It’s more complicated if the problems come from within the black community.