Posted on 12/29/2009 6:11:00 AM PST by DCBryan1
Pastors, police plead for tip on NLR killing
Salvation Army slaying reward at $10,000
JACOB QUINN SANDERS ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Pastors, police and politicians begged and pleaded Monday for information about the unsolved Christmas Eve killing of a Salvation Army major in North Little Rock’s Baring Cross neighborhood.
“I’m asking the community to start snitching,” said the Rev. Benny Johnson, founder of the Little Rock-based group Stop the Violence, during an afternoon news conference at the Salvation Army Corps and Community Center at 1505 W. 18th St. where Philip Wise was shot just after 4 p.m. on Dec. 24.
The longer he spoke, the more earnest Johnson grew.
“I’m pleading,” he said, “I’m really begging.”
Police Chief Danny Bradley added more: "People within walking distance of where we are today” know who killed 40-year-old Wise [in front of his children on Christmas Eve], he said. He asked that the people who know the names of the two men, described as both black [teenage males] and wearing all black clothing, whom police hunted for a fifth day Monday in connection with the killing, be “strong enough to do their duty to friends and neighbors.”
Police have said the killers drifted into the nearby Windemere Hills housing projects after shooting Wise in front of his three children after a botched robbery. The killing was the 10th homicide investigated by North Little Rock police so far in 2009, department spokesman Sgt. Terry Kuykendall said. That number does not include three homicides ruled justified, he said.
Wise served in the Salvation Army for 15 years.
The assembled officials announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the people who killed Wise. Terry Hartwick, executive director of the North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, which opened the reward account, said tax-deductible donations poured into the reward fund from all over the country and that money keeps coming in.
Police said people with information may choose whether to leave their names or not. Anyone with information to pass along to investigators may call (501) 758-1234.
Officials also announced two more funds — one for Wise’s wife and children at Centennial Bank that is not tax-deductible and the other a tax-deductible fund through the Salvation Army to create a music camp in Wise’s name.
Major Harvey Johnson, the Salvation Army’s central Arkansas commander, said the funds could not be announced sooner because banks were closed for Christmas and then for the weekend. He said, too, that he had trouble finding a bank that would open a fund for Wise’s family.
“You’d think it would be easy but we had to go to about 10 banks before we found one that would do it,” he said.
Wise’s family is also eligible for certain benefits because he was working when he died, but officials could not provide specifics on Monday.
Bradley said investigators worked the case nonstop through the weekend. “There’s no new information that I can give you today,” he said.
Asked whether race was a factor in the crime, police said they have not developed any information that the killing was motivated by anything but robbery.
The killers are “sad, sorry and don’t deserve to be in society,” Benny Johnson said.
Also at the news conference, the Rev. O.C. Jones of North Little Rock’s Mount Pleasant Baptist Church said the community needed to band together to purge the killers from its midst. “I don’t feel we’ve done all we really can do,” he said.
The Rev. Reginald Henderson of Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in North Little Rock said the responsibility for solving a homicide did not belong just to community institutions such as the police. “Not just the churches, either, but every household,” he said.
Mayor Patrick Hays alluded to other unsolved killings in Baring Cross, an isolated, depressed neighborhood east of Pike Avenue home to about one-tenth of the city’s 60,000 people. “Success in this neighborhood will be achieved,” he said.
A memorial service for Wise is scheduled for 2 p.m. today at the First Assembly of God at 4501 Burrow Drive, North Little Rock. A funeral service is also set for 11 a.m. Saturday at Spruce Street Presbyterian Church in Morgantown, W. Va. 
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/RICK McFARLAND
Wiping their eyes after a prayer are (from left) Salvation Army Major Jim Bovender, the father-in-law of slain pastor Philip Wise; Captain Roni Robbins; and Salvation Army Community Center secretary Shaveta McKay. The prayer came during the announcement of a $10,000 reward for information on Wise’s Christmas Eve slaying at the community center in North Little Rock.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/RICK McFARLAND
Salvation Army Major Harvey Johnson (left) and North Little Rock Police Chief Danny Bradley announced Monday that a $10,000 reward is available for information leading to an arrest in the Christmas Eve murder of Philip Wise at the Salvation Army Community Center in the Baring Cross neighborhood of North Little Rock.
Wise
It just isn't cool to talk to cops when someone guns down a preacher on Christmas Eve in front of his kids in entitlement communities.
Not one more dime, not one more coat, pair of shoes, or bite of food until they're turned in.
I can’t come up with a response that won’t get me banned.
"The government will help you when you follow the rules of social behavior. Feral populations will not receive help."
I know it is not a very Christian thing to say, but the people in the “Windmere Hills Housing Project” appear to be WAY beyond any hope of salvation or redemption. When agroup of people behaves like a pack of rabid animals, they need to be treated as such.
The Salvation Army should immediately close the center in question and move their mission to a place where the residents are at least still HUMAN.
And even if the Salvation Army does not close the center, Mrs. Wise PLEASE get out now. The fact is that some people are simply beyond being helped. I know it goes against everything you hope and everything you have been tuaght to believe and everything you WANT to believe, but I beg you, do not keep your precious children in that place where they are in danger of being brutalized or killed by the same pieces of garbage who slaughtered your husband.
Where's Obama's quote about how Phillip Wise "acted stupidly"?
These are the people you get when your mommy is Uncle Sam.
Be it checks or schools or medical care, all you get is deviance and sickness.
This is so disgusting. Fox covering now.
What would happen to the stop folks if the entire community was punished since the guilty parties could not be found??
Block off the entire area - absolutely no one in or out just throw in a few MRE’s so they don’t start eating each other. Sick & need a doctor, too bad. Need to go to work, too bad. Need more crack or booze, too bad.
Worked good with my kids, the guilty one would get a lot of heat from his brothers when they ALL got in trouble.
Yeah, I know, it can’t be done, but I can dream, can’t I .
Should be
What would happen to the stop SNITCHIN folks...
Lets be honest here, white liberals except for a few check cashing government hacks have thrown up their hands and have moved on from the underclass minorities. DailyKos that convention of manic depressives, at best might run a feature where the kids can shriek “racist”, but that is pretty weak tea in this day and age.
They already have that covered its called Section 8
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime
No, not scattered throughout the land. That would be like spreading smallpox to the winds. Keep them all together, huddled, where they can prey on each other. No one in their right mind needs free housing enough to live there.
Ditto
Excellent comment and the key word here is “ferel.”
If someone in this housing project knows who the killers are, they CAN pick up a phone and call in an anonymous tip to the police. Listen to a police scanner sometime and hear how many anonymous calls come in from ghetto neighborhoods about shootings, domestics, batteries, robberies, suspicious persons, baby momma drama, gangs of people fighting, etc. They do know how to use the phone...but the black culture is morally broken, the “reverends” are in it for the money, and you have generational public aid recipients who like it just fine. Horrible.
The section 8 voucher tenant based program actually for a government program is not a bad program. It reminds me of the Conservative school voucher proposals. The problem comes from attempts at not only providing housing assistance but when various authorities try to provide the housing itself on a mass scale, creating concentrated poverty. Social engineering at it’s worst.
These complete wastes of DNA need to be impaled, Vlad style.
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