Rochester, NY: City Residents Carjack and Rape Pregnant Suburban Woman

Two men from the city of Rochester, NY were arrested for carjacking a pregnant woman from a suburban Rochester plaza last Tuesday night. Court documents reveal the suspects tore off all the victim's clothing and forced her into the backseat of her car, where she was raped.

The victim begged the suspects to stop raping her, fearing they would kill her unborn baby. Instead, the suspects repeatedly threatened to kill the woman (and her unborn baby) by shooting her in the stomach. After the 90 minute ordeal, the suspects tied the victim up and left her by the side of a rural road.

On Thursday, the local NBC news affiliate interviewed State Assemblyman David Koon, whose 18-year-old daughter Jennifer was carjacked at the tony Pittsford Plaza in 1993. The college sophomore's battered and bullet-ridden body was discovered a couple hours later in a seedy alley in the city of Rochester. Semen recovered from Koon's body led to the conviction of Willis Knight (he now goes by the name Rasool Khadafi, following a jailhouse conversion to Islam), a city resident.

Koon noted there are "a lot of similarities" between this week's carjacking and his daughter's 16 years ago, but left unmentioned (by Koon and by NBC News) was the fact that in both cases white women in the suburbs were victimized by young black males from the city.

The refusal to confront the obvious racial aspect of the carjackings is reminiscent of the mainstream media's coverage of the abductions and murders of college students Eve Carson and Lauren Burk in spring 2008. Initially the media spent countless hours analyzing the similarities between the two cases, but after the murderers were captured not one commentator pointed out the glaring fact that both young white women had been murdered by black men. Instead, the coverage shifted, rationalizations were made, and institutional forces took the brunt of the blame. Carson's murder became an indictment of North Carolina's ineffectual parole system, while Burk's murder was attributed to the military's failure to screen returning Iraq veterans for mental health disorders.




In the autobiographical work Soul on Ice, influential black writer Eldridge Cleaver recounted how in his younger days he purposely targeted white women for rape. Cleaver wrote, "I crossed the tracks and sought out White prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically... Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the White man's law... and that I was defiling his women... I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race." [bold added for emphasis]

Federal crime statistics suggest that black males continue to "cross the tracks" to seek out white prey.

Of the 111,490 single-offender rapes committed against white women in the U.S. in 2005, Department of Justice statistics show that less than half (44.5%) were committed by white men and a full one-third (33.6%) were committed by black men. (Only 13% of Americans are black.) Of 28,350 multiple-offender rapes, only 9% were committed by groups of white men. 30% were committed by groups of black men, and 43% were committed by mixed-race groups.

Victim's advocacy groups report that the majority of women who are raped are victimized by someone they know, while the rest are victimized by strangers. It's hard to see how one-third of the white women in either group could be raped by black men. After all, interracial friendships and relationships are still not very common, and most neighborhoods remain racially segregated.

How are all these interracial rapes occurring? The most likely explanation is that black men continue to venture into the suburbs to seek out white prey.