Posted on 06/16/2008 5:43:44 AM PDT by Dr. Scarpetta
Beau Zabel, 23, came to Philadelphia from Minnesota six weeks ago, eager to experience urban East Coast living and to become a math teacher in the city school system. He found a place to live through roommates.com in South Philadelphia near the Italian Market, and took a temporary job at the Starbucks at Fourth and South Streets.
He recently updated his page on MySpace.com, which proclaims his optimism: "Just waiting for life to begin."
But his life ended about 1:30 a.m. yesterday, when police said Zabel was ambushed as he walked home from the midnight shift at the coffee shop. He was shot once in the neck in the 800 block of Ellsworth Street and fell to the sidewalk, police said.
He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The motive was robbery, said Sgt. Frank Hayes of the homicide squad. No arrests have been made.
"I thought I had to worry about him in the classroom, not on the streets," his mother, Lana Zamora, said by telephone yesterday from Austin, Minn. She was preparing to fly to Philadelphia.
Zamora said that she had driven her son here on May 2 and was assured by his new roommate that the neighborhood was safe. Now she is filled with disbelief and regret.
"Beau decided what he wanted to do," she said. "I raised my children to make their own decisions."
The second of three children, Zabel appeared to be a young man of great promise.
An Eagle Scout, he grew up in the small city of Austin near the Iowa border, where Hormel makes meat products and the city proudly proclaims itself "Spam Town USA." He graduated in 2007 from Augustana College, a liberal arts school in Rock Island, Ill., where he studied mathematics, Spanish, philosophy and computer science.
"He was a really good student," said Thomas Bengston, chairman of the Augustana math department, who described Zabel as good-natured and easy-going. "Things didn't get him down."
Zabel was attracted to teaching, but he did not have a degree in education. He was drawn to the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows program because he could teach in city public schools while getting his certification through Drexel University.
Zabel chose Philadelphia over a similar program in Chicago so he could be near an aunt who lives in Lancaster, Pa., Zamora said. He planned to have dinner on Friday with his cousin, she said.
On Ellsworth Street yesterday, neighborhood youths played basketball just a few feet from where the young man fell, oblivious to the stained sidewalk. Neighbors expressed shock that a violent crime had occurred on their quiet block, though some grumbled about the recent influx of immigrants as a signal that the neighborhood was changing.
Deena Burgase said she was wakened by the shot and immediately dismissed it as a problem with the utility lines - the electrical equipment had popped off recently. It was only after police arrived that Burgase understood that a young man had been killed across the narrow street from her rowhouse.
"I thought it was a transformer explosion," she said. "This is the first shooting in our neighborhood."
Police told neighbors that they would be studying any video of the area that night. There is a police camera on Washington Avenue, and Zabel is believed to have walked near the camera on his way home.
Sgt. Tim Cooney said that Zabel's pockets had been turned out but that he still had his personal effects, including his wallet. Police believe only one assailant was involved.
Zabel was the city's 139th homicide this year, compared with 181 by this time last year.
Zabel's mother got the word yesterday and was eager for any news. "We don't have a whole lot of murders up here," she said.
She was stoic in the way of the upper Midwest, but also numbed by the news. She works as a victim's advocate for a nonprofit organization but did not fully comprehend victimization until yesterday.
"I've worked with a lot of victims," she said. "It's different - a way different feeling - when you're the victim. I thought I would be angry, but right now I don't care what happens to the people who did this.
"It won't bring my son back."
Sure it is but PC is so prevalent even among "conservatives" that we must say with unfettered certainty that the perp could "equally" be any race, creed or ethnicity. Of course anyone waiting for the MSM to forthcoming on these matters is not only naive but being lead around by the nose.
“I’m from Philly and after living there for over a decade growing up, I think it is EXTREMELY safe to say that the perp was black (MAYBE Latino.)”
I would agree that the odds are strongly in favor of such. However, we have some Freepers who jump in on every crime thread where race isn’t mentioned to assure us that solely because race wasn’t mentioned, the perp has to be black. That’s what I object to.
Maybe it will turn out it wasn’t robbery, but a robber ain’t going to find any money in my wallet. I carry it in my pocket. If this guy did the same, then they got his money.
That may be true but Philadelphia has become a cesspool in the last few years. There used to be a only a few dangerous neighborhoods that nobody ventured into at night but now it's terrifying even to go into Center City.
If you can't be angry for yourself, at least have a little empathy for the prior and future victims of these animals.
“Can you produce even one case where a white person who killed a black person in a simple robbery was charged with a hate crime?
Come on, you know as well as I do that the Revvvvvruund Jacksnnnnn, Al ‘Slim Shady’ Sharpton, and the rest of the poverty pimp mob would descend and demand hate-crime prosecution if there was any evidence that it was white-on-black. Remember Duke Lacrosse?”
So your answer is “no?”
The Duke lacrosse case — which, based on outright lies, bad evidence and a liberal trying to get re-elected, did look like a possible racial incident at first — was nothing at all like what we’re talking about here.
Well, because you see lots of shady characters, but 99.9% of the time nothing happens. However, my question would be, who told him it would be safe to be walking home at 1:30 in the morning? Night time is gang time, especially in parks and schoolyards (they mentioned a community swimming pool). As I read here once, nothing good happens after midnight.
“I didn’t care about what happened to the man who caused the accident that killed my son at the time of the incident. It was because of shock, grief, numbness. Give this woman a break, please, she’s just lost her son.”
Sorry, but people who have just lost children are supposed to be thinking rationally and all their comments should fit conservative thought. Otherwise, they’re obviously just overly emotional liberals.
In all seriousness, I’m sorry about your son. Unfortunately, I’m well aware of the all-encompassing grief of losing a child suddenly. Totally rational thought is not possible.
The corect statistic is 12 times more likely than the reverse (this is even stated in "The Color of Crime") and a white person is 7 times more likely to be killed by another white person.
Thank you for your post. I’m sorry for your heartache as well.
You are incorrect. That neighborhood is about 65% Italian-Americans, 23% white yuppies, 5% Asian food vendors and restaurant workers, 2% African-Americans and 5% Hispanic immigrants.
That map at your link is awesome. If you scroll over the red dots representing the individual murders, there is a name and description of the victim. The map lumps together the rough area of Southwark with the safe area of Bella Vista where this teacher was killed, and still there were only three murders. All were young males with ghetto-Islamic names, and none was killed in the Bella Vista section, but rather in the Southwark or Broad Street projects.
Naivete will get white folks killed.
At least the perp was spared the trauma of worrying that he might be shot by his victim.
I understand your motivation and don’t take my post for being a reprimand, more just a statement of my experience.
And you are right, I’ve seen threads that didn’t call for it at all where race is mentioned. I think media PC coverage actually fuels this and has exacerbated that kind of reaction.
While all childrens' deaths are sad, not all liberals are genuinely sad about their own childrens' deaths...liberals have killed many of their own pre-born children by "choice," for example.
Another example, one seared into my memory (and it's a genuine memory, unlike John Kerry's), is of a well-educated liberal couple whose only child suffered a brain injury in an accident.
Although the boy was conscious and alert and making progress in children's rehabilitation center, these parents "chose" to "let him die" by refusing permission for him to be treated with antibiotics when he got an infection from his trach tube.
Perhaps they were too embarrassed to be encumbered by a brain-injured child -- the way Joe Kennedy Sr. was too embarrassed to be encumbered with his retarded daughter.
So while I make no comment on this devastated mother --whose son has just been murdered, not "lost" to a disease or injury-- I will comment on your attempt to throw the typical leftist argument that "conservatives are heartless and mean-spirited and don't understand grief the way we liberals do."
I've seen you do this before on FR: Using your "lost child" story to deflect or pre-empt criticism. If you've actually lost a child --and not by "choice"-- my heart goes out to you. But anyone can post anything anonymously; and even if the story is true, I find it less than honorable to use a story about a lost child in repeated ad hominem attacks on conservatives.
Obviously, this is a horrendous tragedy but whew.... why did this young man essentially commit suicide-by-Philadelphia?
That “general area” is surrounded by some dangerous areas and is not a long walk from any of them. Typically, junkies don’t rob people in their own toilet neighborhoods - - there’s no money in their own toilet neighborhoods - - so they take a quick hop to the Graduate Hospital, Naval Square, Fitler Square, Center City, Queens Village, Northern Liberties, or Art Museum neighborhoods.
Some “nice” neighborhoods, the thugs don’t go near lest their body is never found.
Girard Estates and Bridesburg, for example.
Philly and Chicago are both more dangerous than Bagdad.... but both cities are always run by Dems so how can that be?
Certainly they will find a way to blam George Bush for their own failings and the media will be willing accomplices in this endevour....(see N.O. and Nagy’s incomptence for details of the game plan!)
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