Re-posted and translated by Nicholas Stix
Thanks to reader-researcher “W” for the sendalong.
The reporting could have been worse. Many media operatives would have withheld a mug shot of the perp, and censored all references to race, including his statement. However, it would have been nice if the reporter had given us Sanford's priors.
Newlywed among 4 stabbed in random spree attack near Vegas Strip
Associated Press/New York Post
August 12, 2013, 6:01 P.M.; last updated, 6:04 P.M.
LAS VEGAS — A newlywed was back home in Salt Lake City and facing more medical tests, her mother said Monday, after being stabbed in the back in what authorities called a random attack on four people [Read: a racially-motivated, black-on-white hate crime] on a sidewalk just off the Las Vegas Strip.
Laralynn Stock Caldwell, 20, was honeymooning with her husband, Jackson Caldwell, when she was stabbed in the lower back late Thursday as the couple walked on Harmon Avenue, Diane Stock told The Associated Press.
Laralynn Caldwell told police she thought a man punched her in the lower back, and she didn't realize she was wounded until she reached back and felt blood.
Her husband told KTNV-TV in Las Vegas that he thought a [black] man slapped his wife's backside, but he also saw what he thought was a fake knife in the man's hand.
[I added "black," because I suspect that Jackson Caldwell would have reacted more aggressivley to a white man slapping his bride on the butt, even though the case should have been the reverse.]
The couple returned home to Utah on Friday, where Diane Stock said her daughter was in good spirits but faces ongoing tests to rule out the possibility of blood-borne disease.
"She works at Staples. She's joking that now she has (surgical) staples in her back," Diane Stock said. "She's doing great."
The accused attacker, Lee Anthony Sanford, 53, surrendered to Las Vegas police at a fast-food restaurant minutes after the 11 p.m. Thursday attack. Police say he had a nine-inch kitchen knife and was bleeding from a cut on his hand.
Sanford remained jailed Monday pending a court appearance Tuesday on multiple battery with a deadly weapon charges that could get him decades in prison.
Police said they found no prior connection between Sanford and the people he's accused of attacking.
Also injured were a 56-year-old woman who underwent surgery Friday for a stomach wound, according to police; a 25-year-old man who reported that he was stabbed in the elbow and lower back; and a 15-year-old boy who was with his parents when he said he felt something hit his shoulder.
Sanford, who is black, told police that he thought white people kept bothering him because people like to mess with the poor, according to a police report.
He said he retrieved the knife at home after walking away from a verbal sidewalk altercation with a man he described as white and a bully.
[He started showering a white man he'd crossed paths with with racial epithets, and wanted to murder him, but realized he didn't have any deadly weapons on him, and the man was alert to the possibility of Sanford suckerpunching him.]
Police said Sanford also was sometimes incoherent during a police interview following his arrest [sic]
Sanford needs a public flogging, as do people like him. That would be an appropriate punishment for attempted murder, even though the death penalty would rid us of this sociopath once and for all. Sanford's punishment, and the punishment of others like him, would discourage others who might be inspired to follow in his footsteps.
ReplyDeleteFailing that, Sanford, and people like him, should be deported to Liberia, Malawi or Haiti, or maybe even some uninhabited barren island in the middle of the Pacific or Atlantic oceans. There won't be many, or any, non-black people, like whites, to antagonize and provoke him in any of those places.
At last, Sanford would be at peace. The whip marks on his back would start to scar, and he'd be living among his own people, or among no people at all. But I must admit, I would feel sorry for the decent people in Liberia, Malawi, and Haiti, who would have to put up with Sanford. Maybe a barren island would be best.