Another Cop-Killer Fêted and Fawned Over

Just another example of our topsy-turvy world...

Note to Readers: This post marks a name change, from “Stu’s Newsletter” to “Stu’s Stack o’ Stuff.” The new name, suggested by Chrissie Strider (aka “Subscriber No. 12”), will be recognized by some as an homage to the late Rush Limbaugh, and is also meant to resonate with the “stack” in Substack.com. “Stack o’ Stuff” is meant to help convey the diversity of the topics addressed.

Also note that a version of this essay was published this morning by American Thinker; you may choose to read it here.

Another Cop-Killer Fêted and Fawned Over

In the Throgs Neck section of The Bronx there was a Public Intermediate School, I.S. 192 (that, sadly, was shut down because of poor performance). The school was also known as the Piagentini-Jones School. That name was in honor of two NYPD patrolmen who were gunned down in May of 1971.

Waverly Jones was 33; his partner, Joseph Piagentini, was 28. Each had been on the job for 5 years. They were on foot patrol in a Harlem public housing project when, at about 10 p.m., they were ambushed by three assailants. Jones was shot in the back of the head, killing him instantly; he left behind his wife and 3 children. Piagentini was shot 13 times and died on the way to the hospital, leaving behind his wife and 2 children.

It was a political assassination, carried out by members of the Black Liberation Army, who had declared themselves to be in open “rebellion against a system” which had “cruelly oppressed them as a minority.” It didn’t matter that Patrolman Jones was also Black.

One of the killers, Anthony Bottom, admitted lying in wait for the officers and committing “cold-blooded murder,” adding that “It could have been any officers.”

Jones’s service weapon was taken from his body, and was recovered in San Francisco after BLA members opened fire on a police officer there. According to the FBI, the BLA (an offshoot of the Black Panthers) was responsible for the murders of more than a dozen police officers around the country.

Now comes word, via Daily Caller, that Bottom, who now identifies as Jalil Muntaqim and who was paroled in 2020 (thanks to parole guidelines altered by former governor Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers), has been invited to appear at the State University of New York’s Brockport campus in April. The convicted cop-killer (billed as a “former political prisoner”) will speak on the “History of Black Resistance, U.S. Political Prisoners & Genocide,” although there was no mention of whether he would be posing for photos and signing autographs.

If you’re surprised, shocked or even outraged that a convicted cop-killer would be invited to be the guest speaker at an institute of higher learning, it’s hardly unprecedented. The precedent that comes to my mind is one I wrote about in American Thinker in 2014, when former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook) was selected to give the commencement address at Vermont’s Goddard College.

Abu-Jamal, whose death sentence was dismissed in 2011, is still serving a life sentence for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner, who was 25 years old, married, and had been with the Philadelphia Police Dept. for 5 years.

Faulkner’s killing started with a traffic stop of a wrong-way driver; it wasn’t an ambush, like that of Piagentini and Jones, but it was an execution. Having shot Faulkner in the back while Faulkner struggled with Abu-Jamal’s brother, Abu-Jamal fatally shot Faulkner in the face at close range as the officer lay wounded.

But wait, there’s more! Abu-Jamal is identified by Wikipedia as an “activist and journalist” (he’s written several books while incarcerated), and he has been the commencement speaker at Olympia, Washington’s Evergreen College in 1999 and at Ohio’s Antioch College in 2000.

In both cases, then and now, of convicted cop-killers being fêted and fawned over by college students and faculty, the slain police officers were (as the late Rush Limbaugh would say) unavailable for comment.

ST

Another Note to Readers: If you’d like to read an adventure novel that describes itself as “a political thriller,” allow me to recommend “The Hunt” by my friends Jack Cashill and Mike McMullen (see my review of it here). I mention it because one of the domestic terrorist bad guys is nicknamed “Moom,” and [Spoiler Alert!] it’s not until about midway into the novel that we learn (if we haven’t already figured it out) that he had been named, by his radical parents, after Mumia Abu-Jamal.