Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Just the Facts, Please

The only facts that are known about the last hour and a half of Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax life is that someone stabbed him, and that he lay on a New York street, dying, while over 20 people walked past him and did not bother to call 9-1-1-.

Those are the only facts.

Yet the man is being called a hero.

Do not misunderstand me. I hope he was a hero. There's no reason why he, or any homeless person/illegal alien, couldn't act just as heroically as a citizen of this country. I'm not trying to imply otherwise.

I'm just saying that there are no facts, at this point, one way or the other, to prove what he was, and yet he is being trumpeted as a hero without any facts at all.

I've seen the surveillance video in question, probably we all have.



From this, it is impossible to tell what happened. Perhaps the "attacker" of the woman was actually someone who knew the woman. They stop to talk, the homeless guy stops them and asks for money, the attacker (in this case, really an attacker) overreacts and stabs him, then runs away.

(Of course, perhaps the video shows more than what is shown here, and the actual stabbing has been edited out. The vidoe does seem like it has been edited at that point.)

I saw nothing in the video to suggest what Yale-Tax was doing before he was stabbed...being a hero or asking for money.

Obviously, if he was panhandling he didn't deserve to be stabbed, either. It just disturbs me that on the basis of no evidence at all, except for the fact that he died, the man is being hailed as a hero.

Obviously, the people who let him lie where he was without lifting a finger to call 911 are scum, as is the woman who, whether victim or innocent bystander, is as well. She at least would have called 911, one would have thought, always assuming she had a cell-phone.

Now, anyone want to take bets that Law and Order will be doing a story shortly, featuring this tragic incident as a jumping off point?