White Girl Bleed a Lot (4 page)

After reviewing thousands of videos with more than five hundred episodes of racial violence, I thought at some point I would lose my capacity to be surprised.

Then came Temple University.

In just a bit you will read about an event that just might be crazier than the episode that gave this book its name. Until then, here is a little background. Temple University is a Philadelphia school that, like Columbia and the University of Southern California, is located in a high crime, urban neighborhood. (
Urban
? Now they have me using euphemisms.) So the people who run Temple University decided they needed to do something about violent mobs. Naturally, they contacted their medical school because it’s a public health thing. After lots of deliberation, they decided to hire community activists from the neighborhood—people with “street cred.”

Imbued with street cred, they go around and talk to the leaders of the violent flash mobs in Philadelphia and convince them to stop beating, looting, stealing, vandalizing, and all that.

They spent $500,000 to hire three outreach workers. One of them was a twenty-six-year old guy named Brandon Jones. “Brandon Jones knows the streets of South Philadelphia, and he understands what his young clients are going through in their
daily lives. He can relate,” wrote Pearl Stewart in
Diverse
. She went on to write—and here’s the kicker—“Jones says he understands the high energy level of youths and the need ‘to blow off some steam.’”
²¹

Here is what kind of terrible person I am: I would not have believed the above quote if someone told me, if I read
about
it, or if I heard
about
it on TV or radio.

I would only believe it if I read it myself. You can check out the article yourself.

After Nutter delivered his stinging rebuke of massive black violence in Philadelphia, it is tempting to say all was well. It did seem better. At least for a while.

In February 2013,
Philadelphia Magazine
wrote a story about how white people are afraid of black violence, even afraid to speak about it. Nutter went ballistic. Gone were the conciliatory words and calls for personal responsibility. Nutter asked the city’s Human Relations Commission to investigate the bad man who wrote the article.
²²

Then three weeks later it happened again. Two hundred black people on the streets of downtown Philly, fighting, rampaging.

Which, of course, is where we started.

This book is about predators and victims. But some people fight back. We’ll talk about them too.

“White boy in’ the wrong place at the right time. Soon as the car door open up he mine”

R
eady to play the Knockout Game?

The rules are pretty simple: Find a white guy—alone is important. Make sure he looks defenseless. Punch him in the face as hard as you can. Don’t stop until your arms get tired or he gets knocked out. Or worse. If he goes down, you win. It’s called the Polar Bear Game in Illinois, but we’ll get into that later. Versions of these games exist across the country, but the St. Louis version is the most popular. You can play anywhere, but a “vibrant and culturally mixed” district is probably best.

Over the last two years, the number of Knockout Game attacks has ranged from twenty (if you believe the police) to one hundred (if you believe people actually playing and watching the game). Or even more, if you believe a local judge.

And that is just in St. Louis.

In October 2011 fifty-one-year-old Matt Quain was on his way home from a local grocery story, ready to celebrate a Cardinals’ victory in the World Series when he was attacked by
a mob of black people. They left him with a broken jaw, black eye, and stitches in his face. St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay came across Quain in the gutter, unconscious:

The group walked in front of the mayor’s car, across Grand. Slay noted how relaxed they looked. He glanced back at the library. He saw a man face down in the street, motionless, feet inches from the curb, blood pooling on the pavement. … They looked like little kids, he thought. They laughed and held aloft cellphones like they were snapping pictures.
¹

Seven black people were arrested for the attack. Police held a meeting at Roosevelt High School and begged the kids to please stop the Knockout Game. Two weeks later, a fifty-four-year-old man was beaten repeatedly. Two of the people arrested had been at the meeting.
²

The Quain trial was supposed to begin in January. Instead, the district attorney dropped the charges because a thirteen-year-old witness did not show up for the trial. Mayor Slay said it was a case of witness tampering. “My strong guess is that she was intimidated, threatened not to testify which is why she did not show up,” Slay said to the
Post-Dispatch
. “The case fell apart and the second-degree assault charges were dropped, followed by cheers and high-fives among the defendants.”
³

There was also plenty of jubilation on Facebook, which the
Post-Dispatch
reported. This included a dispatch from a black person known as the Knockout King, because he was universally acclaimed to be the master of this athletic art form:

FREE ALL MY TKO GUYS

Despite the otherwise excellent coverage, at no time did the
Post-Dispatch
ever include a description of the race of the attackers.
The paper even disabled the comments section of news stories associated with this and other Knockout attacks, because readers were demanding to know details.

Flash forward to 2013. One of the accused attackers in the Quain Knockout Game was shot dead trying to break into a St. Louis home during an attempted burglary. Demetrius Murphy will not be playing the Knockout Game anymore. Ever.

Murphy’s grandfather, Paul Furst, told KSDK that Murphy was mentally challenged and did not deserve to die:
⁴

I believe this is another one of the Trayvon Martin stories where people are getting so gun happy they shoot just on impulse now. I could understand if he was a threat. But on the property, he was not a threat.

Murphy was fifteen years old.

The Knockout Game is also popular with Asian immigrants. As victims.

In April 2011, two elderly Vietnamese immigrants were attacked. Seventy-two-year-old Hoang Nguyen and his fifty-nine-year-old wife, Yen Nguyen, were “walking in an alley behind the 3800 block of Spring Avenue [when] two males and two females approached the couple, who were on their way home from a Vietnamese market. Nguyen was punched in the head and kicked in the abdomen. He died at a hospital. His wife suffered an eye socket fracture when she was punched in the face. Elex Levell Murphy was arrested for the attack and told police the attack was part of the “Knockout Game.”
⁵

In 2012 the attacks started again. In May a man who was too scared to allow police to release his name was beaten by a group of up to a dozen black people. “The thirty-year-old male victim was walking on the sidewalk … when a group of teens approached. [Edward] Townsend punched the man. Police
said it appeared to be another example of the Knockout Game and arrested Townsend. He was convicted in March 2013 and sentenced to one year in prison. He was the only member of the gang to be charged.
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In the early morning in March 2012, an unconscious Pete Kruchowski was found in the middle of the street, near his bike (which showed little sign of damage). Kruchowski sustained skull fractures, broken bones, a punctured lung, and bruises. Some people believe he was a victim of the Knockout Game even though police said it was just a bike accident. Umar Lee is a St. Louis writer, activist, and boxing coach. In his video blog and in an interview, he says police ignore many Knockout Game assaults because they make the city look bad. Almost all of the perpetrators are black and the victims are not, he says. But the boxing coach knows why:

If you raise your children to be victims, they’ll be victims as adult. Who do they attack? The elderly, the poor at the bus stops, immigrants, weak yuppies, the Woody Allen crowd, pencil neck geeks on their iPhones. Why? Because they won’t fight back. They’re looking for an easy victim. The root of the problem, in my opinion, father’s not raising their children.
⁷

St. Louis police and others say the attacks have been happening in waves since 2006. In 2009 in Columbia, Missouri, security video shows a group of nine black people stalking a man into a parking garage. They hit him, knock him down, kick him, then run away. Soon, however, they returned, picked him up, hit him
some more, and kicked him again.

The Riverfront Times
found a friend of the game players who said the number of players was more than twenty:

“Based on our intelligence, we believe it’s an isolated group of maybe five to nine kids,” said Police Chief Daniel Isom.

Local teens say it’s far more popular than that.

“I’d say maybe ten to fifteen percent of kids play Knockout King,” Aaron Davis, who’s eighteen and lives in south city, adding that he never took part. “It’s not a whole school, but it’s a nice percentage.”

Some former participants maintain Davis’ estimate is too low.

“Everybody plays,” says eighteen-year-old Brandon Demond, a former participant who provided only his first and middle names for publication.

“It’s a game for groups of teens to see who can hit a person the hardest,” explains Brandon, who’s standing with a group of friends on Grand Boulevard as a police officer listens nearby. “It’s a bunch of stupid-ass little dudes in a group, like we are now. See this dude walkin’ up behind me?” — Brandon gestures to a longhaired man walking toward him on the sidewalk — “We could just knock him out right now.”
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