Too bad about young Michael Cutler, the college kid who was shot dead last May on the West Side in an apparent robbery-homicide.
Say you don’t recall that name, Michael Cutler?
Well, that’s understandable. People get murdered all the time on the West Side by punks in search of quick cash. It’s not big news. Ask any Chicago cab driver.
The vast majority of the victims there are black, of course, as are their murderers. It’s a sad fact-of-life in have-not neighborhoods like Austin, where Michael Cutler got a bullet in the chest while waiting for his date to come out of her house. FBI crime statistics indicate more than 90 percent of all blacks murdered nationally are killed by other blacks.
Michael Cutler, however, was white. And his assailants were . . . well, the police haven’t caught the two hooded men who shot Michael and stripped him of his De LaSalle High School ring.
I would guess, in all probability, that the killers were black. This will be considered a racist assumption by some. So be it. Twenty-five years in the newspaper business, including a few on the night shift, have taught me never to discount the most likely explanation. At least not without strong evidence to the contrary.
Cutler was murdered in a predominantly black area where drug addiction and dealing are epidemic, along with the violence that goes with that. The idea of white muggers working the 5900 block of West Erie Street in the wee hours of a Friday morning is, well, highly unlikely.
So why this post-mortem about a white kid who got caught, as they say, in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Because we’re going to be hearing a lot more about Michael Cutler’s death in the weeks and months ahead. It will be one of the big stories in Chicago this summer. And it’s a story, I’m afraid, that’s going to get as ugly and as racially divisive as stories get.
Michael Cutler, you may have guessed by now, was one of the eyewitnesses to a much more publicized crime that occurred here in March of 1997–the beating of a 13-year-old African-American youth named Lenard Clark.
Lenard was battered senseless–almost killed–allegedly by three white toughs who didn’t like the idea of black kids bicycling through their neighborhood–Armour Square, just north of Comiskey Park. From the beginning, the police and the state’s attorney handled the incident as a “hate crime.” The Rev. Jesse Jackson made televised appearances at Lenard’s bedside and even President Bill Clinton took time to condemn the act of racial hatred.
Only now the case is taking some bizarre twists.
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It turns out that one of the three indicted for beating Lenard Clark, Frank Caruso Jr., is the son of a powerful ex-union boss with alleged ties to organized crime. It further turns out that another eyewitness to the beating, Richard DeSantis, has disappeared mysteriously, just when authorities want to make him a witness for the prosecution against Caruso and pals.
All of a sudden the prosecution’s case looks to be coming apart for lack of witnesses (though Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine insists he has enough evidence to proceed.) And just as suddenly a lot of people are having second thoughts–dark, conspiratorial thoughts–about that murder last May on the 5900 block of West Erie Street.
The speculation last week–in some of the major local media and on black talk-radio–was that something very sinister is afoot here. Even some of my colleagues at the Tribune are saying, in private, that the murder of Michael Cutler was likely no coincidence. They’ve been quick to buy into what could be called “The X-Files” explanation: That the Mob put a hit on Cutler and is hiding DeSantis in order to spring the younger Caruso. As for the police department’s insistence that Cutler’s murder looked like a random mugging, the conspiracy theorists just smile knowingly, as if to say “What do you expect?”.
Well, I sincerely hope the Chicago police catch the creeps who murdered Michael Cutler. And I strongly suspect that when they do–if they do–it will turn out to be what police think it is–a senseless but all-too-typical act of random violence by drug-addled thugs.
Until those arrests are made, however, and until young Mr. DeSantis is found and hauled into the jury box, watch for the forces of political and racial correctness (PC and RC) to play this one for all it’s worth.
The Lenard Clark beating was reprehensible, for sure, but so are those who seek to exploit such incidents (the Jasper, Texas, truck-dragging atrocity being a recent case in point) as typical of white attitudes and actions toward blacks. They are not.
In fact, something quite the opposite is true.
Those same FBI statistics (available on the Internet at www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr96.htm) show that blacks, year in and year out, kill twice as many whites (558 in 1996) as whites kill blacks (247). My fellow columnist, Clarence Page, recently reported on this page that whites commit more “hate crimes” against blacks by a ratio of more than 3 to 1.
No doubt that’s also true. Then again, what really happened to Michael Cutler, after all the facts come out, won’t be classified as a hate crime. The way PC/RC works, he’ll go into the books as just another white guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.