[image of photos of women raped and murdered
by Lonnie David Franklin, Jr., over decades, is from here]
Pictured above:
Debra Jackson, 29
Henrietta Wright, 35
Barbara Ware, 23
Bernita Sparks, age unknown
Mary Lowe, 26
Lachrica Jefferson, 22
Alicia Alexander, 18
Princess Berthomieux, 15
Valerie McCorvey, 35
and Janecia Peters, 25
(Also pictured, Thomas Steele, from 1987.)
Because the U.S. government and dominant society values and requires the serial rape and mass murder of women, so these men will be regarded with a perverse kind of awe and respect. These men's acts, always described as done by sick individuals, or "bad apples", cannot be any more sick or rotten than the institutions and systems of abuse, violation, degradation, subordination, and slaughter that support their actions by reinforcing and protecting the values, attitudes, behaviors, and structural power that allows men to rape and kill women, serially or not, but always politically, and always terroristically. Why aren't rapist-murderers called terrorists? Because the U.S. media prefers to identify the population from which terrorists come as non-U.S.-born people of color who are not Christian. And according to the U.S. government and media, the term "terrorist" simply and absurdly cannot apply to a person who is militarily fighting for the
What we know is that the rape and murder of one "good" white woman with class privilege will garner national, and international, media attention-rapt attention, obsessive and exploitive, attention. But the victim will be named as a person, an individual, a human being, if white and not poor or a prostitute. Not so when Black women are killed even when they are not poor, are not prostitutes, and don't have, as the press calls it, "troubled lifestyles", as if all they needed was a lifestyle makeover, not a radical societal transformation. If anyone, female, trans, intersex, or male, is trapped in systems and cycles of drug abuse and prostitution, the P.I.M.P.s, W.I.M.P.s, dealers of illegal drugs will not be seen as complicit in the demise of their lives, even though they are. Patriarchal and white supremacist institutions--all dominant social institutions, including media, will not be seen as complicit, because our society isn't set up to hold "a system of gross exploitation, rape, and murder" accountable, not an institution that fosters and enforces the invisibilisation of Black women as people in the minds of dominant U.S. Americans.
Only one man will now be charged with their murder, which means the physical, emotional, and sexual abusers and drug dealers in these women's "troubled" lives, if abused and addicted; the capitalists who ensure their impoverishment, if poor; the pimps and procurers, the rulers and profiteers of the systems of racist-misogynistic exploitation and degradation, such as the pornography industry; and the institutions and businesses--legal and illegal, will be free to do more harm, making human rights, civil rights, and simple recognition by a dominant society that a person is a person, impossible for a global, national, or local group of people who are both Black and women.
When can we expect the value of a poor Black woman, anywhere in the world, be equal to the value of any white person or any man? I don't know. But I know that telling the media that they are complicit, telling the pimps and procurers, the profiteers and the politicians, the media and press moguls that they are complicit, would be like screaming in a sound-proof booth. What is especially horrible and terrifying is that whenever a Black woman in her teens, twenties, or thirties screams for help, there is less dominant social support and assistance for her than for anyone else, except, perhaps, the children and the elderly who are poor, Black, and female. How little white wealthy men know about what it is to be seen and treated, daily, by society, as worth nothing at all, unless it is to be used and abused as a thing for men's sometimes murderous pleasure.
I don't want Lonnie David Franklin, Jr. to have a superhero comic book's name like "The Grim Sleeper". I want him to be remembered as the killer of many women whose lives will likely not be regarded as worth much whether they remained alive or were raped and killed, except by their loved ones. And I don't want U.S. soldiers in any of the armed services, to be welcomed home as heroes if they've raped and murdered any women of color. Will the President and other military leaders agree to not give a hero's welcome to such men? Will media agree to stop giving serial killers "cool" names?
One woman who has been putting a lot of effort, using media resources, including her radio program, to promote awareness of the racism, sexism, and classism of how murder is reported in this country, is Margaret Prescod. A bit more information about her in relation to this murder case is from *here* at democraticunderground.com.
Margaret Prescod, who founded the Black Coalition Fighting Black Serial Murders and worked heavily with the families of the victims in the case, told CNN she spoke with the Grim Sleeper Task Force who informed her of the arrest Wednesday. Prescod said Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, head of the task force, told her that unlike a previous arrest in the case that turned out to be wrong, he was sure they had gotten their man this time.
"He told me that what they have is very solid," Prescod said.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/07/07/grim.sleeper.arrest...
I like the way CNN fails to tell there listeners / readers that Margret Prescod has a radio show on KPFK!
Sojourner Truth with Margaret Prescod
Tues - Fri 7:00-8:00 AM
HOST: Margaret Prescod
PRODUCER: Margaret Prescod
http://kpfk.org/programs/142-sojournertruth.html
From the Black Coalition Fighting Black Serial Murders website:
Did you know that the serial murders of Black women* have been going on unresolved in South L.A. since the 1980s? Law enforcement has divided the murders into three sets, but the time periods overlap and it isn’t even clear how many women have actually lost their lives in this brutal and vicious way.
Because the killings were not connected as serial murders, the tragic enormity of the situation has been hidden and downplayed, and vital evidence, connections and patterns may have been missed. Public and media attention which would have been greater if the total numbers of deaths had been known, would have spurred the police into a more vigorous investigation. Lives might have been saved and the community better protected from further attacks.
Families of several of the victims were never notified by law enforcement that their loved ones were killed by a serial murderer—and neither was the lone survivor of the attacks. Each was made to believe that it had been a random killer. Many families had to learn from press articles or from television! Crucial patterns of evidence have been missed.
Why was so little done in 20 years to solve these murders? If the murders had not happened in South L.A. against working-class Black women but in Beverly Hills or some other affluent neighborhood would they have been handled with the same lack of care and seriousness, would they be so under-reported by the media? What do you think?
DNA leads to arrest in Grim Sleeper killings
LAPD task force traces evidence from a slice of pizza to Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 57, whom neighbors call 'a very good man.'
By Maura Dolan, Joel Rubin and Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times
For well over two decades, the killer had eluded police. His victims, most of them prostitutes in South Los Angeles, had lived on the margins of society, and their deaths left few useful clues aside from the DNA of the man who had sexually assaulted them in the moments before their deaths.
A sweep of state prisons in 2008 failed to come up with the killer or anyone related to him. Then, last Wednesday, startling news came to the LAPD: A second "familial search" of prisons had come up with a convict whose DNA indicated that he was a close relative of the serial killer suspected of killing at least 10 women.
Working through the Fourth of July weekend, LAPD detectives drew up a family tree of the prisoner, then began analyzing all the men on it. Were they the right age? Did they live near the murder scenes? Was there anything in their background to explain why the serial killer had apparently stopped killing for 13 years, then resumed in 2003?
From that painstaking process, according to LAPD officials who requested anonymity, the prisoner's father emerged as a likely suspect. An undercover team was sent to follow him; they retrieved a discarded slice of pizza to analyze his DNA. On Tuesday, they confirmed that it matched the DNA of the suspect in the killings.
On Wednesday, police went to the South L.A. home of Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 57, and arrested him without incident, authorities said.
Franklin is charged with 10 counts of murder in the deaths of Debra Jackson, 29, Henrietta Wright, 35, Barbara Ware, 23, Bernita Sparks, age unknown, Mary Lowe, 26, Lachrica Jefferson, 22, Alicia Alexander, 18, Princess Berthomieux, 15, Valerie McCorvey, 35, and Janecia Peters, 25. He is also charged with one count of attempted murder, apparently stemming from the assault on the only victim who is known to have survived.
The killer was dubbed the "Grim Sleeper" by the L.A. Weekly.
As word of the arrest spread across South Los Angeles, neighbors and relatives of the victims began to gather near Franklin's home, and a contradictory picture of the suspect emerged.
Franklin was a garage attendant at the LAPD's 77th Street Division station in the early 1980s, according to city and police sources. He worked as a garbage collector for the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation during the years that the first eight killings occurred, beginning with the death of Jackson on Aug. 10, 1985, and ending with the death of Alexander on Sept. 11, 1988.
Franklin has at least four prior convictions, two for felony possession of stolen property in 1993 and 2003, one for misdemeanor battery in 1997, and one for misdemeanor assault in 1999, according to court records. He was sentenced to a year in jail for the first stolen property charge and 270 days for the second one.
On a tidy street of single-family homes in South Los Angeles where Franklin lived for decades, residents described him as a kind and compassionate neighbor who volunteered in the community, helped elderly residents of the block and fixed their cars for free.
"A very good man. His daughter just graduated from college, I believe," said Eric Robinson, 47. "He's a good mechanic, worked out of his garage. I've been here since 1976 — that's how long I've known him. I'm not pretty shocked, I'm all the way shocked."
Dante Combs, 27, said he visited Franklin last week to ask him to install a timing belt on his car.
"You needed your car fixed, he'd do it dirt cheap. He'd help you out however he could, cut your grass, put up your Christmas lights," Combs said as he stood behind the yellow crime tape that sealed off Franklin's block. "He helped all the elderly on the block."
In the afternoon, families of Grim Sleeper victims began arriving on the block. Many of the killings occurred not far from Franklin's home, and the family members said they needed to come to his home to bear witness.
"She was found on Western and 92nd, in a dumpster," Diane McQueen, 55, said as she stood behind the crime tape, clutching a funeral program for her niece Peters, the last victim attributed to the serial killer. "It hit my family real hard. I had lost hope this day would come. I feel a lot of joy it did at last."
"I wanted to see what his house looked like, what his neighborhood looked like, the place where he grew up," Donnell Alexander, 47, brother of victim Alicia "Monique" Alexander. " It was curiosity. What I found was that it wasn't far from where I grew up. His neighbors looked like the people I see every day. They weren't aliens. And he wasn't hiding in the community."
In announcing the arrests, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley praised the LAPD and the California Department of Justice, which carried out the DNA "familial search" after Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown approved the use of the relatively new tool.
Only California and Colorado have formal policies that permit the use of software to look for DNA profiles of possible relatives of a suspect.
After years of futility, the LAPD stepped up its investigation of the serial killing case in 2007 when Police Chief Charlie Beck's predecessor, William J. Bratton, formed a task force to work exclusively on the case.
With so many years having passed since the killer first struck and the police only belatedly linking the long string of victims to a single killer, the team of detectives was left at a severe disadvantage. Investigators pored over old case files in search of important clues that might have been overlooked. They tried to re-create the seedy, violent world of South Los Angeles in the 1980s that the early victims and killer had inhabited.
One after another, leads that at first seemed to hold promise dissolved frustratingly into dead ends. But with public pressure mounting, the detectives tried whatever approaches they could, however seemingly farfetched.
They asked undercover vice officers to collect DNA samples from middle-aged African Americans arrested for soliciting prostitutes, hoping to identify a suspect.
The entire department was put on notice that members of the task force were to be summoned to homicide scenes that resembled the work of the serial killer in any way.
Most tantalizing was a 911 phone call an LAPD operator received in 1987. The caller said he had seen a man dump Ware's body out of the back of a van into an alley and gave the vehicle's license plate before hanging up. On the night of the call, the van was traced back to a now-defunct church in the area, but detectives at the time failed to pursue the lead aggressively, much to the dismay of Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, who headed the task force.
Kilcoyne and his team tried, 20 years later, to breathe life back into the investigation of the van. Detectives tracked down about 10 men associated with the church and took DNA samples to test against the suspected killers.
A visit to the retired deacon at his home outside of Macon, Ga., turned up nothing, as did a visit to a Florida prison.
The hunt epitomized the agonizing slog the detectives faced day in and day out.
"We never gave up on this investigation, not for one minute," Beck said in a statement issued by his office. "Our detectives worked relentlessly, following up on every lead they received. Their hard work has resulted in today's apprehension of this vicious killer. I am hopeful that the hard work of these men and women will bring some closure to the families who tragically lost loved ones during the last 23 years."
Times staff writers Hector Becerra, Andrew Blankstein, Robert Faturechi , Jack Leonard, Ann M. Simmons and Richard Winton contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Thank you for identifying femicide for what it is.....terrorism. In Canada the slaughter of innocents centres around Native American women.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.highwayoftears.ca/links.htm
They say if you kill one you scare the rest.