PO MELVIN
SANTIAGO MADE
THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE
RIP POLICE
OFFICER MELVIN SANTIAGO
YOU WILL
FOREVER BE REMEMBERED, RESPECTED
AND HONORED
FOR YOUR SERVICE AND SACRIFICE.
TAGS:
JERSEY CITY POLICE OFFICER MELVIN SANTIAGO,
LINE
OF DUTY DEATH, OFFICER SANTIAGO LEAD INTO
AMBUSH,
STREET CRIME, RANDOM NATURE OF VIOLENCE,
ASSAILANT
KILLED ON SCENE – SWIFT AND RIGHTEOUS JUSTICE,
POLICE
ASSASSINATIONS, AMBUSHES AND TARGETED KILLINGS
(Sunday July, 13, 2014 Jersey
City, NJ) It was not about money, drugs,
or turf. It was not a “random crime”,
one of those inexplicable set of circumstances that introduce mortality into
the equation. Not at all. Jersey City Police Officer, 23 year old
Melvin Santiago was lead into an ambush in the predawn hours this morning. The shooter lured his quarry under the guise
of a robbery in progress. The assailant
entered the 24 hour Walgreen Drug Store at the typically busy intersection of
Communipaw Avenue and Kennedy Boulevard approximately 4:00AM this morning. There was no “robbery in progress”; quite the
contrary. Within minutes of over-powering
the armed security guard and taking his firearm, the assailant laid in wait in
the shadows of the early morning. While still inside the Walgreens it has been
widely reported and confirmed that the assailant remarked to a customer that
she should “watch the news…I’m going to be famous”. What was the pathology darkening this man’s
mind? What social mores or gang
affiliation demanded him to assassinate an Officer of the Law? The answers to these questions will not be
found if sought through the prism of violent intent or simply “malice
aforethought”. The cold blooded killer fatally
shot Officer Santiago before he was able to fully exit his patrol car. Police
Officer Santiago, just 10 months on the JCPD never had a fighting chance;
actually, he had no chance at all.
In a fundamental way it is
easier to accept a Line of Duty Death (LODD) when the circumstances are such
that the Police have a fighting chance in the scenario. Some firmly believe that there is no nobler action than to sacrifice oneself to save innocent lives, to prevent a civilian
tragedy by assuming all the perilous risks associated with the job of a Law
Enforcement Officer (LEO). Across this
country in big cities and small, in the suburban sprawl and rural expanses and
every place in between the men and women of the Law Enforcement Community (LEC)
assume those risks, usually anonymously, thanklessly day in day out. Officer Santiago answered a call of a ‘robbery
in progress’ no doubt without wasting any precious time considering his mortality. Such a selfless response cannot be taught; it
is buried deep with the genetic composition and mindset of the people that
respond to events from which others naturally – and commonly – flee.
NEW BREED OF CAT
As the Members of Service
(MOS) of the LEC know all too well there is no true cellar to the criminal
mind, there is no final stop that indicates the ultimate of human
depravity. Just when you think you’ve
seen it all, you catch a job that exceeds all previous experiences. The daily headlines provide sickening proof
of the depths of the darkness in our violent society. Some of these crimes leave our minds numb and
render it incapable of comprehension.
And that is how it should be; we should NOT be able to understand the
etiology of acts of madness, the psychopathology of the murderous minds among
us. However, we should take notice of the increasing violence that infects our
country and grows like a toxic fungus within the fabric of our society.
In 1968 the legendary country
music genius Johnny Cash debuted a new song while performing for the inmates in
the California Maximum Security Penitentiary at San Quentin. That song, “A Boy named Sue”, would go on to
be one of his most popular signature songs.
In that song, Cash had a lyric saying, “I shot a man in Reno just to
watch him die”. The inmates applauded
wildly after that famous lyric while the wider world may have seen it as mildly
amusing, perhaps as a hollow metaphor for the senseless banality of crime. At that time most of America could not relate
to the lyric within the catchy tune.
After all, who would shoot someone just to watch him die? In the years since that song was widely
popular we have become all too familiar with and sickened by the very real fact that
often men (men commit murder on an order of magnitude of over 300% more often than women) kill
men and sometimes for the simple reason of watching them die. In some of the most crime
riddled pockets of America today some of the killing the thousands of street gangs practice
are part of a twisted ethos to be conducted as a “rite of passage” for initiation into the gang. They celebrate the code of “Blood In,
Blood Out” as a symbol of their loyalty and allegiance to the gang. The grinding need to be accepted
into a gang demands recruits to murder someone; either a specified target or a
random individual. If this is not one
element of proof positive illustrating the cheapening of human life in high
crime and gang occupied “turf” nothing is.
And then there are the “lone
wolves”, again, usually men who decide to perpetrate a mass casualty/mass
fatality spree of havoc in places such as a movie theater in Aurora Colorado,
Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, and so many other
places. There is no practical remedy for
the levels of violence, particularly murder, available today or tomorrow. We live in a free and open diverse and disparate
country of almost 450 million souls with a total of approximately 600,000 LEO
combined. That is truly the “Thin Blue
Line” charged with the seemingly impossible mission of maintaining order, preventing
entire segments of our cities and town from devolving into anarchy and chaos. Think about those two numbers for a minute
and you can grasp the magnitude of the challenges confronting the LEC today.
AMBUSHES, ASSASSINATIONS, AND MALICE AFORETHOUGHT
When most people imagine an
LEC being killed in the LOD, they do not think of such events as assassinations
or ambushes. Typically, they might read
about an Officer involved in the shoot-out, an Officer responding to a crime in
progress who intercepts the suspects during or after the crime. But in the annuals of Metropolitan New York
City Law Enforcement there is a long history of assassinations and evilly
concocted ambushes. Earlier today when
Officer Santiago was responding to the call of a crime in progress he had no
way of knowing he was quite literally walking into his own death. By the words of the perpetrator himself, he
was out to assassinate an Officer to be “famous”. His was a chilling statement but one
increasingly common among cold blooded killers who are getting younger and
younger. Within some of the best
organized street gangs it is not uncommon to find 13, 14 and 15 year old
members with multiple murders on their hands.
Death, murder in particular, as an excepted, encouraged, and required ritual
as a requisite of gang life reduces innocent human life to nothing more than
shooting randomly at an inanimate object.
Once a killer kills for the first time that threshold has been forever
lowered and easier to cross with each notched death on his belt.
In the long hot summer of
social unrest and racial strife that blazed across cities from coast to coast
in 1971, a militant band of Black Activists associated with the Nation of Islam
actually declared “war” on the NYPD. Members
of the Black Liberation Army placed a bogus 911 call to lure Police Officers to
a site on 135th street in Harlem where they laid in wait for their
quarry. NYPD Officers Joseph
Piagentini and Waverly Jones , responded, walking in a well-planned ambush
and into their deaths.
In the frigid early morning
hours of February 26, 1988 was a time when many of the neighborhoods in NYC were rife with
drug trafficking and related crime, when some of the large housing projects
were overrun by drug dealers and thugs while the innocent residents lived under
siege in their own freezing apartments or small homes, too intimidated to speak
to the Police fearing for their lives.
One brave family had agreed to step forward and agreed to testify
against the drug kingpins that were running roughshod over their
community. To protect the house of the
witnesses overnight an NYPD Officer, a rookie, named Edward Byrne held vigil
alone in his patrol car and was ambushed by four men, shot five times in the
head at point blank range. We could keep
citing scenarios such as these. The
murders of NYPD Detectives James
Nemorin and Rodney
Andrew in March 2003 were particularly brutal. They had been working under cover and had
made a “deal” with a known gun trafficker.
The night the deal was to be finalized, Ronell Wilson the gun dealer and
a career criminal, entered the undercover car, sat behind the unsuspecting
Detectives and shot them both, “execution style”, in the back of their heads at
point blank range. He then dumped their
dead bodies out into the street.
Just a few weeks ago two North
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Officers were assassinated in the restaurant they
had stopped for their noontime meal. It
takes a very particular kind of beast to murder Law Enforcement Officers. Anyone capable of callously calculating and
coldly crafting to assassinate, ambush, or execute an Officer would not
hesitate for a heartbeat to kill any other member of society. The nature of this beast be they created by
nature or nurture, is becoming a more prominent wildcard in the social deck of
our country.
SUCKER PUNCHED
Back in the New York City of
the 1980’s a practice, for lack of a better word, became popular among street
gang members and other groups of aimless marauding young men known as “wilding”. In the summer months in particular bands of
young men would venture out of their neighborhoods in The Bronx, Washington
Heights and Harlem and descend upon places like Central Park. They would roam while intimidating, sometimes
robbing and beating up people, and otherwise creating mayhem and a
free-floating sense of anxiety among all New Yorker’s most especially those
from the tonier neighborhoods of Manhattan and in the subways.
A variant of this form of
intimidation has developed lately. With
each passing week we read about some unguarded,
unsuspecting pedestrian becoming the victim of a brutal from-out-of-the-blue
sucker punch. The danger of a sucker
punch is that the victim has no chance to react; once struck by an unabated
roundhouse to the chin, jawline, temple or behind the ear, they are usually
rendered instantly unconscious only to keel over striking their heads on the
unforgiving concrete sidewalk, black asphalt or cement of a subway
station. The blow itself delivers a
concussive force which is exponentially accelerated when the victim drops
backwards like a felled tree creating another concussive force. The locations and victims of these assaults
are as random as can be. We have seen
them in all Five Boroughs. It is both an
act of extreme brutality as it is of profound cowardice. NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has asked for
a rapid study of this trend seeking to find patterns in their occurrence. Since
there is no firearm involved other pedestrians, even ones in close proximity to
the victim, do not realize what has happened until they hear the victims head
crack on the cement. Many of these
victims have sustained serious cranial fractures, intracranial bleeding, and
for a few the punch has left them comatose.
Like so many other violent urban
trends that seem to appear suddenly, there really is no way to accurately
analyze and access the collected data and translate it into actionable
intelligence. Needless to say these
random attacks have some New Yorkers already bemoaning the believe that NYC is
in some ways reverting to its “bad old days” and this could not be further from
the truth. NYC and the NYPD are leaps
and bounds from where we were in the 1980’s and there is no going back.
JERSEY CITY
An immediate extension of the
Greater New York City Metropolitan Area, Jersey City, with a population nearing
250,000 is the second most populated in the state. It sits directly across from lower Manhattan
and is even linked to Manhattan Island via the public transportation subway
network known as the PATH Train. Over
the last two decades of development and gentrification along New Jersey’s “Gold
Coast” – Jersey City and Hoboken to be precise – the eastern section of Jersey
City bears little resemblance to the rest of this old blue collar industrial
town. Crime overall has declined in
Jersey City yet, as in so many other cities there remain pockets of tenacious
crime, drug use and associated criminal activity. Jersey City has its share of active street
gangs some of which are “heavily involved” in the illegal gun trade along the
infamous “I-95 Corridor”; that stretch of the Interstate Highway System that
runs from southern most Florida to Bangor, Maine. The New Jersey State Police and Law
Enforcement Agencies whose jurisdictions include long segments of the corridor
as well as task forces from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency
(ATF) who routinely run “sting” operations in various locales along the heavily traveled route seem unable to staunch the flow of illegal firearms into the NYC Metro Area.
THE PERPETRATOR: LONG CRIMINAL HISTORY, NOTHING NEW
The depraved, conscienceless career
criminal who set up the fatal ambush where the 23 year old Jersey City Police
Officer, Melvin Santiago was summarily executed, 27 year old Lawrence Campbell, has a lengthy criminal past
and has been wanted for questioning in another homicide in Jersey City. At the present time the JCPD have scant
information to work with given the fact that Campbell’s atrocity appears to
have been hatched in his own deranged mind.
Killing for fame (or infamy) has become all too disturbingly common in
recent years as the death toll for active duty LODD continues to trend upwards. All the criminologists, studies, internal and
interagency reviews fall short of identifying causative factors except the most
obviously disturbing one; these people do kill for “sport”, they view murder
especially the murder of a Police Officer as a jewel in their crown and an
act of such explicit brutality and barbarism does provide the perpetrator with
some “street cred”, a mutant form of respect meant to endow them with some
degree of “respect”. This malignant
logic is the motive behind far too many murders of rival gang bangers, targeted
enemies, innocent by-standers, and Police Officers. One need not do more than scratch the surface
of the mentality of the “sport killer” or random "gang-banger" to get a glimpse of true evil.
The only redeeming element to
this tragic story is that Police Officer Melvin Santiago’s death was immediately
met by the death of his murderer. There
will be no arrest, lengthy evaluative process including mental and
psychological testing, no protracted legal maneuvers of filed motions, extended
habeas corpus and postponements. No, not this time. Lawrence Campbell no doubt found himself
rapidly en route to hell just as the last breath of life escaped Officer
Santiago’s lungs. And that is how it should
be. Justice, street justice applied
swiftly and finally.
The Brooding Cynyc extends to
the family of Police Officer Melvin Santiago our condolences, thoughts and
prayers. We hope they can find some
comfort that young Melvin lost his life doing what he had so badly wanted to
do since his boyhood. He did his family
proud, served his Department bravely, and acted on the behalf of all those
residing in Jersey City as a sentinel assigned to protect others from madness;
the very same madness that sent him to an early grave and into the arms of the
Lord. He made the supremely unselfish, valorous
act and the ultimate sacrifice.
Rest Easy, Officer
Santiago. Your work here is done. Thank you for your Service and
Sacrifice. Bless.
EOW July 13, 2014
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The Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved
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