by WorldTribune Staff, April 19, 2021
“He cares more about the criminals than he does about the victims.” That is was Shaki’ra Wilson-Burroughs says about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.
Wilson-Burroughs, whose brother, Philadelphia Police Sgt. Robert Wilson III, was gunned down in the line of duty, is one of a growing number of families of crime victims who have joined the fight to oust Krasner in his re-election bid next month.
Krasner was elected in 2017 after a campaign bankrolled by leftist billionaire George Soros.
In the May 18 primary in the overwhelmingly Democrat city, Krasner will face Carlos Vega, who spent 35 years as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia before becoming one of the dozens Krasner fired as soon as he took office.
The families of crime victims say Krasner has made the city significantly less safe with his leftist agenda that is part of Soros’s quest to transform the U.S. criminal justice system.
“I know many local mothers whose sons were murdered and they are seeing their cases unravel,” Maria Martinez, whose son Brian Lawhon II died after he was viciously beaten at a 7-Eleven in 2019, told The Washington Times.
“Some guy gets off, it’s like deja vu. You think losing your child would be the hardest part, but dealing with Mr. Krasner has been just as bad.”
After Lawhon died from his injuries , police charged a 26-year-old man with murder. But Martinez told The Washington Times that Krasner’s office worked hard to lower the charges to aggravated assault.
Martinez said she recently learned from a friend that the case had been continued. She said that when she reached out to the assistant district attorney he acknowledged that was true.
“He said he was sorry he’d forgotten to notify me and, at the end, said sort of ‘oh, by the way, I’m not handling your case anymore,’ ” Martinez said. “He gave me the name of a woman who I called and was told she was on vacation. That was three weeks ago. I haven’t heard a thing.”
Terri O’Connor’s husband James, a Philadelphia police officer, was killed while executing a murder warrant in 2020.
“When Krasner tried to visit the hospital where Mr. O’Connor had been taken after his shooting, Philadelphia officers barred his way and refused to let him enter,” James Varney noted in the April 17 report for the Washington Times.
“He never called me,” Mrs. O’Connor told Varney.
The four alleged killers in O’Connor’s case had at one time all been facing charges, some of them murder, but been released because of Krasner’s bail policies, according to former U.S. Attorney William McSwain.
The Philadelphia Citizen reported earlier this month that, since Krasner took office, the number of gun crime arrests in the city has nearly tripled, but the conviction rate for gun crimes has plunged to 49 percent.
In January, the Philadelphia Citizen reported that, under Krasner, homicides have increased by 58 percent. Yet, “what Krasner has done with Election Day looming is to double down on ideology, regardless of the tragic facts that lead every nightly news broadcast,” Larry Platt wrote in the April 9 report.
Krasner had no prosecutorial experience when Soros’s Truth and Justice PAC showered him with more than $1.2 million. Before the 2017 race, no candidate for Philadelphia district attorney had spent $1 million on a campaign, records show.
Similar large amounts of money from Truth and Justice PACs backed prosecutorial bids in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago and many smaller locations in at least 8 states, Varney noted.
“In those big cities, violent crime has spiked to record levels. Violent crime also spiked across the country and in other cities.”
In St. Louis, the top prosecutor funded Soros, Kimberly Gardner, was re-elected last November. In Los Angeles, where Soros-backed district attorney George Gascon took office in January, a recall effort led by crime victims’ families has been launched.
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