The Patriot Post® · The Human Cost of a Woke DA
On Saturday night, February 18, at around 8:34 p.m., the moment before she lost her legs, 17-year-old Janae Edmondson was with her mom and dad, walking back to their hotel after her first day of competing in a volleyball tournament at The Dome in downtown St. Louis.
At 11th and St. Charles Streets, a speeding gray sedan driven by a 21-year-old armed robbery suspect named Daniel Riley failed to yield and collided with another car. Surveillance video reveals the sickening crunch of metal as the collision pinned Janae between two cars, critically injuring her and crushing her legs.
Just like that. In an instant, due entirely to the failure of a woke district attorney and a weak criminal justice system, a young woman’s life has been brutally and irrevocably altered. Edmondson, a 3.7 GPA student and a three-sport athlete at Tennessee’s Smyrna High School, had recently committed to play college volleyball at the University of Tennessee Southern.
“She has undergone an amputation for both legs and at least four surgeries as of right now,” according to a GoFundMe page set up by her Mid TN Volleyball Club. Her condition, thankfully, was recently upgraded from critical to stable.
Riley, the perpetrator, has a history of criminal offenses and was out on bond despite having allegedly violated his GPS-enforced house-arrest conditions 51 times. He was arrested on three counts of assault, operating a vehicle without a license, and armed criminal action.
That’s too little, of course. And too late.
On Thursday, we reported that Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, fired St. Louis circuit attorney Kim Gardner, a George Soros-backed district attorney. Bailey had called for Gardner’s resignation, but to no avail.
“The leftist Gardner,” we wrote, “has accumulated a history of refusing to prosecute criminals of color due to her commitment to a ‘restorative justice’ agenda, which is a critical race theory-based ideology that blames ‘systemic racism’ for a minority’s crime rather than holding the perpetrator to account.”
This was an avoidable tragedy, and it’s just one of many that we see in the crime-ridden streets of our big cities — and especially those cities whose district attorneys have been put into office by the America-hating leftist financier George Soros. Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner is another, as is Carol Siemon in mid-Michigan’s Ingham County, who failed to enforce the laws on the books and thereby allowed a deranged man to legally purchase the firearms used in a recent massacre at Michigan State University.
Another such DA is Los Angeles’s George Gascon, who recently suspended the attorney who prosecuted a 26-year-old “transgender” child molester.
As Fox News reports, “Shea Sanna, who had been the lead prosecutor for part of the case, is accused of misgendering and ‘deadnaming’ the convicted child molester Hannah Tubbs, who is now accused of beating a man to death in the woods with a rock in Kern County.”
As for Gardner in St. Louis, she held a defensive and semi-coherent press conference on Thursday in which she decried “the vitriol, the hate, the racist attacks” against her while spinning a yarn that even mainstream media fact-checkers found to be full of holes.
“There are numerous attacks on our office,” Gardner said. “There are numerous individuals that have an agenda to make sure that my office does not succeed. … We did our job. As I said, could we do more? We could. But did we not do nuthin’? That is not true.”
Apparently, then, the performance standard for woke DAs is to strike a balance somewhere between doing “nuthin’” and protecting the citizenry from violent criminals.
Elections have consequences — very real consequences, and very human ones.