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Stories, stories. I have a pretty full portfolio myself, but I’m always ready to appropriate those I hear from other people. One of them, a shocker, came to me the other day from the American Justice program on the Arts and Entertainment Channel. It went back to 1999 on the Old Chain of Rocks bridge over the Mississippi River. A young white man and his two female cousins strolled over it one night and were attacked by a group of blacks. The girls were raped and all three were forced to jump seventy feet into the river.
The girls drowned, but the boy survived. The police didn’t believe the story he told them and were about to have him arraigned when a search team discovered a flashlight and other items at the scene which they were able to trace to four local men. When they were searched they had property of the victims on them. They all confessed, but it took thirteen years before the ringleader, Marlin Gray, was executed.
That was a quick summary. I usually don’t reprint stories like that here, preferring to draw on my own experiences instead, but sometimes you come across things that are so way-out and at the same time so forgotten or buried that they seem worthwhile repeating. So I’ve given you the Philadelphia poison ring of the Thirties and Forties, the Missouri massacre of 1932 and some other memorable incidents overlooked by history. There’s more where they came from, I’m sure.
I have an episode from my own collection to bring out here that illustrates that when it comes to crime some things don’t change much even if they involve completely different people in widely separated locations. I’ve said that all the St. Louis suspects confessed to their acts when caught but of course that didn’t last. They later disclosed that they had been coerced by the police and had evidence planted on them even though they were never even at the scene, as attested to by some of their parents and relatives.
These claims were given the full weight due to them and as a result they were all convicted and sentenced to life terms, except Gray, the instigator, who got the death penalty and finally paid it after his case had gotten before the Supreme Court two times.
How does all this tie in with my own little episode that came down at a time and place distant from the horror show I’ve described? The likeness is not in the fact situation, but it is in the elements, as I will try to show.
It all began with a peaceful scene on a quiet evening of an ordinary day. Three customers and a bartender were quietly co-existing at the bar of a neighborhood joint in Rosedale, Queens, when a chap named Felix Mojica strolled in with a friend named Raymond Masi and asked for change for a five dollar bill. The bartender refused this and Mojica put a gun to his head and demanded all his money. He then went behind the bar and extracted cash from the register drawer.
There had been a little byplay between the two robbers, with Masi refusing orders to go behind the bar to get the money, so that one of the customers, who happened to be an off-duty sergeant, took advantage of the distraction to slip his gun out of his holster and confront Mojica from the far end of the bar. Instead of surrendering, Mojica aimed at the sergeant, who promptly blasted him with four shots to the chest and leg. That ended things and in due time I arrived along with an inspector to see what the commotion was all about. I eventually produced a report, which you are reading here in condensed from.
It may seem that I’ve stretched things a bit when I claim there’s a link between the two crimes covered in this paper, but there is one there. I find it in the denial routine which was part of both stories. The only real difference between the two is that Masi, the accomplice in the stickup, didn’t wait for question time to begin his exculpation but got going right at the scene, telling the skeptical cops that, hell, he didn’t even know that dude that got himself shot inside, but only just met him outside and happened to go in at the same time. That didn’t wash because it was learned that the two “strangers” had been arrested together earlier in the year. Masi was reduced to claiming that he still wasn’t an accomplice because he’d refused to clean out the cash register when ordered by Mojica.
So, with the repudiation routine used in St. Louis, and the anticipatory one in Queens, we have the common element of denial in both cases. I confess I was looking for one because after I had committed myself to writing the Queens story I came across the St. Louis one and felt compelled to write it, making it natural to look for a link between them.
There may be a link between them but there’s no comparison, as I’ll freely admit. St. Louis was a horror like none I’ve ever seen, and I can only wonder why I never heard of it in 1991. Where was the publicity machine that’s put a trivial incident like Jena on every front page in the country but buried this atrocity? I wonder. | |
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