A few days ago, three White men were convicted in a Georgia courtroom of the murder of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery. The trial was nationally televised and perceived as racially motivated. Whether it was actually a hate crime will be determined in a second trial of these men by the federal government. The national media will surely cover that trial with plenty of openly racial commentary.
One commentary that will be absent is the double assassination of Paul and Lidia Marino two months after Arbery was murdered. Was there a connection? Many indications point to the Marino executions as revenge for Arbery by an African American.
Paul Marino (86) and Lidia (86) were on their daily visit to a Delaware cemetery on May 8, 2020 to mourn at the grave of their son Anthony. Lurking nearby with a rifle and gun-scope was Sheldon C. Francis, 29, wearing a black hoodie, black pants, black mask, black gloves, and black boots. Around 10:15 AM, Francis killed Lidia instantly; Paul, an Army veteran, was fatally wounded and died the next day. Police were called and cornered the shooter in the woods. In an exchange of gunfire, Francis was killed or committed suicide. The double homicide was reported as a “random” crime. The national media had no interest in the “random” murder of two Italian Americans by a Black shooter – it was only locally reported. FOX News, however, carried the story – that’s how I heard of it.
“It was like a regimen,” their son Ray Marino, 60, one of two surviving sons along with twin Paul Jr., told a local reporter. “Mom and Dad visited my brother’s grave every single day, without fail, unless there was inclement weather. They usually went there in the morning.”
Our Institute tried a number of times to obtain information on Sheldon Francis from the Delaware State Police and from the internet. The Police refused our FOIA request because we are not Delaware residents. The internet contains nothing beyond last May’s original news of the double murder. Essentially, Sheldon Francis has become an “unperson.” Yet, we have what looks to be a mugshot of him (below), which means he may have been arrested for something else before he killed the Marinos.
Their executioner Sheldon C. Francis
So, why link this murder to the Arbery case? One conservative internet source suggests a connection, supposedly based on Sheldon Francis’s social media postings: “he was particularly troubled by the killing of Ahmaud Arbery,” to quote the site. Credible? Maybe. The local newspapers reported at the time that Francis had absolutely no relation to the Marinos – through family, friends, work, run-ins, the cemetery, or whatever – hence the reason the State Police labelled the murders “random.” Clearly, we, and the family, need to find out what the Delaware State Police know about the killer’s past – from social media, searches of his home, phone, and computer, and any interviews they conducted with his family, friends, and co-workers. Did they investigate any of these things?
Certainly, the media will never pursue the State of Delaware or investigate Francis on their own. Let me go out on a limb and suggest the Marinos will never be of interest because they were not linked to organized crime, were not an ‘oppressed’ minority or religion, nor were they celebrities. In fact, being White victims of a Black executioner so contradicts the national “narrative” of race relations, it guarantees that they will remain a statistical footnote.
All media practice what I term “news by omission.” You can’t fit all the news into a limited time slot, so edits have to be made. The Marino murders wound up on the editing floor, like so much else in our “woke” country, in order to mold public opinion. Imagine if the FCC required every media outlet, including the supposedly balanced Nightly News, to post this disclaimer: Warning! This report may be edited and filtered to meet the commercial and political needs of our corporate family.
As for the Marinos, absent a serious press inquiry the State of Delaware may never consider this a hate crime. -JLM
Similarly to the Marinos, another event that mainstream national media has not covered is the recent stabbing of two Italian men in NYC. One of them, a Columbia university graduate student, died. The perpetrator is a non-white member of the gang “Everybody Killas”. An Italian conservative newspaper reported that the perpetrator hates white people. Apparently, killing white people is a way for gang members to improve the ranking and reputation within the gang.
The Italian graduate student was killed in the same park where Tessa Majors was stabbed to death in 2019. Mainstream media covered Tessa Majors’ tragedy although it did not fit the national narrative. My understanding is that murders of attractive young white women are still covered because of ratings and clicks.
and to add to the fray, almost totally ignored in national media, except for some talk programs, are the new rash of gangs or packs of thieves, primarily Blacks and some Hispanics, who cruise into neighborhoods and overwhelmed a security system and take thousands of dollars of merchandise. Its the “elephant in the room” that no one wants to talk about, especially mainstream media, for fear of being labeled racist or ethnically profiling, unless it may be Italian American. Those rules of journalism don’t seem to apply
The iconic Union Square shopping center in San Francisco looks like a boarded-up war zone and, shopping malls have been the latest target of the looters….there is no longer even an attempt to justify their actions…the looters assemble en mass, and target a high-end store and loot. It has gotten so bad that many drug store chains have pulled out of high looted areas, just giving up their lease or selling stores…So what happens is that minority communities are underserved, jobs lost, and then venture out of their neighborhoods to safer areas to shop, bringing the same element to follow with the mobile looting…what it is going to take to demand this action to stop is for the same minority communities to speak out against this behavior and stop any sort of justification based on historical wrongs….that is wrong thinking too.
This did not receive much coverage from the media but the report I saw, referred to the victim as David and not Davide and did not mention that he was Italian.
“Oh, what a tangled web they weave, when the media doth practice to perceive!”
One doesn’t want to see any person or ethnicity forever tainted; still, when you step back and observe the routine stereotyping of Italians in the media—as either criminals (Italian Americans) or non-people (Italians: David vs. Davide)—anyone with a sense of right and wrong should be able to see this blatant, unrelenting bias.
The media either laugh us off (late-night talk show hosts) or ignore us (viz a viz our recent misgivings over the gross caricatures in the current House of Gucci movie).
As I write this, the Jussie Smollett case in my home city of Chicago is coming to a close. A local Chicago Sun-Times columnist wrote a column today which neatly deflects Smollett’s crime and case (a gay Black man who tried to guilt-trip our society for his own monetary gain) into a plea for how homophobic crimes are real and that they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Nice PR spin.
But, much more disturbing to me is the recent crime in Waukesha, WI whereby a crazed career criminal plowed through throngs of people in a Christmas parade, killing six and injuring over 40 others.
Ordinarily, any sitting U.S. President (or even vice-president) would attend the services, much like Clinton did after the Oklahoma bombing and Obama did after the Charleston church shootings. What links those tragic incidents is that “white supremacists” (the new tag word for any Caucasian criminal) were the perpetrators. The killer in Waukesha, WI remains a mystery to the American public, yet not to President Biden or his advisors, apparently. Acknowledging this criminal, even via a public appearance, would open Biden up to criticism by BLM and other activists.
And yet: we all know the name “Kyle Rittenhouse” or can point to those “white racist murderers” in the Arbery case. Media objectivity mysteriously flies out the window.
It is sadly ironic that the mainstream media–dominated by an admirable need for racial justice–is actually fanning the flames of racism rather than muffling them out.