Seven black people were arrested for the attack. Police held a meeting at Roosevelt High School and begged the kids to please stop the Knockout Game. Two weeks later, a fifty-four-year-old man was beaten repeatedly. Two of the people arrested had been at the meeting.2
The Quain trial was supposed to begin in January. Instead, the district attorney dropped the charges because a thirteen-year-old witness did not show up for the trial. Mayor Slay said it was a case of witness tampering. “My strong guess is that she was intimidated, threatened not to testify which is why she did not show up,” Slay said to the Post-Dispatch. “The case fell apart and the second-degree assault charges were dropped, followed by cheers and high-fives among the defendants.”3
There was also plenty of jubilation on Facebook, which the Post-Dispatch reported. This included a dispatch from a black person known as the Knockout King, because he was universally acclaimed to be the master of this athletic art form:
FREE ALL MY TKO GUYS
Despite the otherwise excellent coverage, at no time did the Post-Dispatch ever include a description of the race of the attackers. The paper even disabled the comments section of news stories associated with this and other Knockout attacks, because readers were demanding to know details.
Flash forward to 2013. One of the accused attackers in the Quain Knockout Game was shot dead trying to break into a St. Louis home during an attempted burglary. Demetrius Murphy will not be playing the Knockout Game anymore. Ever.
Murphy’s grandfather, Paul Furst, told KSDK that Murphy was mentally challenged and did not deserve to die:4
I believe this is another one of the Trayvon Martin stories where people are getting so gun happy they shoot just on impulse now. I could understand if he was a threat. But on the property, he was not a threat.
Murphy was fifteen years old.
The Knockout Game is also popular with Asian immigrants. As victims.
In April 2011, two elderly Vietnamese immigrants were attacked. Seventy-two-year-old Hoang Nguyen and his fifty-nine-year-old wife, Yen Nguyen, were “walking in an alley behind the 3800 block of Spring Avenue [when] two males and two females approached the couple, who were on their way home from a Vietnamese market. Nguyen was punched in the head and kicked in the abdomen. He died at a hospital. His wife suffered an eye socket fracture when she was punched in the face. Elex Levell Murphy was arrested for the attack and told police the attack was part of the “Knockout Game.”5
In 2012 the attacks started again. In May a man who was too scared to allow police to release his name was beaten by a group of up to a dozen black people. “The thirty-year-old male victim was walking on the sidewalk … when a group of teens approached. [Edward] Townsend punched the man. Police said it appeared to be another example of the Knockout Game and arrested Townsend. He was convicted in March 2013 and sentenced to one year in prison. He was the only member of the gang to be charged.6
In the early morning in March 2012, an unconscious Pete Kruchowski was found in the middle of the street, near his bike (which showed little sign of damage). Kruchowski sustained skull fractures, broken bones, a punctured lung, and bruises. Some people believe he was a victim of the Knockout Game even though police said it was just a bike accident. Umar Lee is a St. Louis writer, activist, and boxing coach. In his video blog and in an interview, he says police ignore many Knockout Game assaults because they make the city look bad. Almost all of the perpetrators are black and the victims are not, he says. But the boxing coach knows why:
If you raise your children to be victims, they’ll be victims as adult. Who do they attack? The elderly, the poor at the bus stops, immigrants, weak yuppies, the Woody Allen crowd, pencil neck geeks on their iPhones. Why? Because they won’t fight back. They’re looking for an easy victim. The root of the problem, in my opinion, father’s not raising their children.7
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Umar Lee on the Knockout Game
St. Louis police and others say the attacks have been happening in waves since 2006. In 2009 in Columbia, Missouri, security video shows a group of nine black people stalking a man into a parking garage. They hit him, knock him down, kick him, then run away. Soon, however, they returned, picked him up, hit him some more, and kicked him again.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Comin’ Back for More
The Riverfront Times found a friend of the game players who said the number of players was more than twenty:
“Based on our intelligence, we believe it’s an isolated group of maybe five to nine kids,” said Police Chief Daniel Isom.
Local teens say it’s far more popular than that.
“I’d say maybe ten to fifteen percent of kids play Knockout King,” Aaron Davis, who’s eighteen and lives in south city, adding that he never took part. “It’s not a whole school, but it’s a nice percentage.”
Some former participants maintain Davis’ estimate is too low.
“Everybody plays,” says eighteen-year-old Brandon Demond, a former participant who provided only his first and middle names for publication.
“It’s a game for groups of teens to see who can hit a person the hardest,” explains Brandon, who’s standing with a group of friends on Grand Boulevard as a police officer listens nearby. “It’s a bunch of stupid-ass little dudes in a group, like we are now. See this dude walkin’ up behind me?” — Brandon gestures to a longhaired man walking toward him on the sidewalk — “We could just knock him out right now.”8
St. Louis seems to be the most popular place for the game, but it is not the only place. Attorney and writer John Bennett says the game is also played in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Illinois, where it’s called Polar Bear Hunting.
COLLEGE CAMPUS FUN
College campuses are popular places for racial violence. Montee Ball, Heisman finalist in 2011, was on the other end of the violence spectrum: A victim.
Ball has not been the same player since five black men attacked him in August 2012, sending him to the emergency room with head injuries. In 2012, the Wisconsin Badgers were ranked twelfth in the AP college football poll. Ball had been a 2011 first-team All-American running back for Wisconsin and was a pre-season favorite for the Heisman Trophy. Wisconsin was a team to watch and Ball was one of the stars. At least he was before he was knocked to the ground and surrounded by men who were kicking him in the head. Ball had just left a campus hangout and if his girlfriend had not thrown herself over him to protect his head, it could have been worse, said Ball’s mother.9
The once-mighty Ball started the season as, at best, an ordinary running back. “I wasn’t doing too well earlier on in the season,” he told reporters after a victory over Purdue. “And things weren’t really going my way.” After an early season loss to Oregon it was clear that prospects for Ball—and his twelfth-ranked team—would have to be lowered. The Top 25 quickly became a distant memory for Badger fans.10
Two months after the attack, sportswriters wondered if Ball was ever going to get his groove back. At least one reporter figured it out, in part anyway: “Could Ball still be feeling some lingering effects from an off-the-field physical altercation that occurred in early August?11
An altercation? It was an assault. It is amazing how often reporters cannot figure out the difference.
Either way, CBS Sports observed: “Montee Ball’s Heisman campaign is on life support.”
Badgers fans were hopeful that Ball’s big game against Purdue was a sign he was back. It wasn’t.
Ball’s Heisman chances may have died, but at least he lived. Another college football player, far from Heisman glory, was not so lucky.
In 2012 about thirty miles from Pittsburgh, a mob of black people attacked Washington and Jefferson College running back Timothy McNerney. He died.
“We don’t have a very detailed description other than that there were several males, and that the majority of them if not all of them are black males,” said Detective Dan Staneck of the Washington police.12
Black mob violence is a new component of life at college campuses around the country.
In June 2012 in Grand Rapids, five black men, including a fourteen-year-old, “broke into a home … near the Grand Valley State University Pew Campus, hitting victims over the head with a weapon, tying them up, and then repeatedly raping a woman.”13
Next stop on the college black mob violence tour is Richmond, Virginia. The Virginia Commonwealth University was the site of several assaults and even a murder over three months in the first half of 2012.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Cigarette Bandits
In August 2012 a crowd of fifteen to twenty black people were seen cruising through the streets of Richmond near the VCU campus. Within five minutes, the mob attacked and robbed at least two people in two separate episodes. “They punched a man, then went up to a VCU student and punched him two times before stealing cigarettes.”14
In September “black males of an unknown age” were responsible for what the CBS affiliate called a “Sunday assault near VCU campus, the latest of several.”15 Several days later, a group of black men, one carrying a pistol, confronted a VCU student outside of a fraternity party.16
In October VCU campus officials issued an alert after six armed robberies were reported in or near the campus within one hour. All the suspects were black. Local print and electronic media identified them as such.
On October 6 four black men robbed and killed a man a few blocks off campus in a student neighborhood.17
On October 8 three black men robbed a VCU professor on campus.18
University officials even issued a warning: It can be assumed that conditions continue to exist that may pose a threat to members and guests of the VCU community.
At least one person who lives near the campus knows why: “That’s where VCU decided to expand into—the historically hardcore black areas,” said a poster to a local_news site. “I don’t [see] why planners didn’t foresee any of this. Either clean up the area once [and] for all or VCU should shift its expansion to another part of town.”19
POLAR BEAR HUNTING
As forthcoming as Richmond media may be, print and electronic media at the University of Illinois in Champaign took the opposite tact when confronted with a wave of racial violence over the last three years. They ignored it. They hoped it would go away. Instead it got worse.
It even got its own name: Polar Bear Hunting.
But truth can come at strange times and in strange places. A liberal columnist recently claimed conservatives were imagining the epidemic of hundreds of episodes of black mob violence and lawlessness in more than ninety cities. However, reluctantly, Esteban Moberley, a Salon reader, set the record straight:
I live in Champaign, Illinois, home of the University of Illinois. For the past several years, we have had an onslaught of groups of young black men assaulting white men at random. They ambushed and beat students on the campus and people in their own yards. These victims were not typically robbed, just ambushed and beaten senseless.
They beat up our weatherman in one incident.20
By then, even the local media could not keep it out of the press. The News Gazette told the students what the Chicago Tribune never will. The weatherman was the latest in a growing list of white men in town being beaten by young black men for a “sport.”21
In the summer 2012 William Stockdale III was beaten, robbed, and almost killed after leaving a University of Illinois campus bar. Two black men were eventually convicted of the crime, including one who had a previous conviction and was still on probation from a Polar Bear Hunting attack two years earlier.22
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Brawl at Central State
Even Salon’s loyal liberal reader Esteban Moberley had to admit:
Perhaps this sort of thing doesn’t happen everywhere, all the time, but it does actually happen, and I can’t believe my liberal college town of 100,000 is the only place this sort of thing is happening.23
True that.
Out in Ohio, college racial violence took a different form. About two hundred black students from Central State University and Wilberforce University, two black colleges, had a brawl in May 2012, and at least one of them took a video. The Dayton Daily News said the mob attacked the police when they tried to break it up.
In 1986 Jeanne Clery was a freshman at Leigh University. After she was raped and murdered in her dorm room there was a strong outcry about how crime was reported on campuses nationwide. In 1990 the Clery Act was signed into law and requires all colleges and universities that get federal funding to keep records on all crime on or near their campuses. Although some University violence does not make it to the press, all schools must report it. At the University of Missouri, a Clery Act report details racial violence of at least four black people in August of 2012.24
Down the road in St. Louis in April 2012, student videos capture another large brawl on the campus of St. Louis Community College-Meramec. Details are sketchy. Nothing about this mob violence appeared in the newspaper. But the video shows dozens of black people fighting, with one complaining that someone did something to her baby.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Meramec Brawl
Maybe that is not news. Maybe that happens all the time. Maybe it is normal. Or maybe it’s not and the newspapers just don’t want to report it.
At Buffalo State University in September 2012, two mobs of black people assaulted two groups of students. Earlier in the month, the local papers reported four other attacks and robberies. The attacks all featured groups of three to twenty people, and all of them black. Some of the injuries required surgery.
The chief of police in Buffalo, Peter Carey, offered a solution to the epidemic of racial violence: The victims have to learn how to behave in the big city: “The City of Buffalo is an urban environment, and if you come from a rural section of the state, this is a different setting.”25
In the careful double- and triple-speak surrounding racial violence, sometime it helps to have a translator. The chief of police of a major metropolitan US city just excused black mob violence because white people did not know how to behave. Which of course echoes the remark of the Philadelphia mob member who told his victim, “It’s not our fault you can’t fight.”26
In the fall of 2012, WND (formerly WorldNetDaily) reported on dozens of examples of racial violence and lawlessness in and around the campus of the University of South Carolina. Police officials say race had nothing to do with the violence. Their plan to stop the attacks: Crack down on the victims drinking in local bars. As for the predators, nothing.
Back in the Midwest in September 2012 violence was reported at some universities. A block away from the campus of Michigan State University, a mob of black people beat two students, forcing one to drop out of school. The headline of the student newspaper told the story: “Another brutal assault alleged near Michigan State campus in East Lansing.”27
Near St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, a student was walking with a couple women “when a car carrying five to seven people passed them and stopped.” One of the passengers got out and punched the student in the face. He died.
A few days later, police arrested Jesse Smithers, who was awaiting sentencing on another assault case. The judge placed a no-contact order around several witnesses after they told the judge friends of Smithers had been threatening them.28
In October 2012 Karl Olsheski and two women were walking near the University of Pittsburg campus when three black people crossed the street and harassed them. It was early Sunday morning and the Pitt Panthers had just returned to Pittsburgh after a 20-6 victory over the Buffalo Bulls. Star Pitt running back Ray Graham made the first move. He stepped in front of Olsheski and asked “What’s up?” Graham did not know Olsheski, but Olsheski knew him. Lots of people did. He was a big man on campus at Pitt, the fourth most prolific running back in Pitt history.
Olsheski and the two women tried to keep moving, but Graham got in their way again. Graham called him
what the police are referring to as a “racial slur,” which in other times and other places would take this crime to a new level: A hate crime. But not here. Not now. Not with the Big Game against Notre Dame looming.
Then things escalated when Devin Street—one of the “most dangerous punt returners in America,” according to the announcers at the Big Game—punched Olsheski in the head.
A few weeks later the players were charged with assault and conspiracy, but that did not stop them from suiting up against Notre Dame. During the Big Game Olsheski broke for several long runs, picking up 172 yards on the ground. He also caught six passes. NBC Sports mentioned the crimes only once, albeit briefly. They called it a “confrontation.”
To Karl Olsheski, it seemed more like an assault.29
Unlike other examples of the Knockout Game, no one died. No one went to the hospital. Soon everyone was on their way. Game over. Olsheski lost.
This was almost just another case of another anonymous assault. More often than not these cases go unreported because more and more people believe the police won’t do anything about it. But not this time. In this case, all three victims told police they recognized at least one of the players—or attackers. One of the women shared a class on vampires with star wide receiver Devin Street. The other knew Pitts from an African-American dance class. They identified Graham from a photo line-up.
Despite the eyewitness testimony of the three victims, authorities did not arrest the football players. Nor would there be a perp walk for these alleged violent offenders. Instead, police charged them with misdemeanor assault and conspiracy. The players received their summonses in the mail.
University officials said they were not going to “rush to judgment” and suspend the players. After fans learned the three players would be allowed to play in the next game, their reaction ranged from indifference to resignation. One student noted that anyone who thought the players were guilty was a closed-minded bigot.30
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