Let’s just hope Detroit cops caught the right guy this week for the murder of synagogue president Samantha Woll. An arrest with charges is not necessarily the same thing as a conviction.
And even a conviction can sometimes prove false if authorities are pressured by the press and the public to solve a sensational crime. Donald Trump himself taught us that (unintentionally) more than a quarter-century ago in the case of the Central Park Five.
First, the current, local backdrop.
Woll’s stabbing death on Oct. 21 in Lafayette Park might have been metro Detroit’s most horrifying crime of 2023, in part because she was both a faith leader and a political activist amid a religion-based foreign war and domestic political strife.
Even the capture of her alleged killer leaves the living with that queasy, uneasy feeling.
To wit:
If such a thing can happen to an important and well-liked local figure in an upscale and well-policed neighborhood near downtown, how safe is anybody, anywhere, in this sprawling metropolis that some external critics still think of as the “Murder City?”
Further, are we sure a sketchy ex-convict with a rap sheet is not a convenient scapegoat taking false blame for someone else’s crime? As you might expect, the lawyer for the accused Michael Manuel Jackson-Bolanos, 28, suggests that very thing.
“This evidence is very circumstantial,” attorney Brian Brown told the Detroit News, adding that his client might have been in “the wrong place at the wrong time” to be wrongly charged.
On Wednesday, the Wayne County prosecutor’s office charged Jackson-Bolanos with first-degree felony murder and home invasion, among other things. If convicted, he could face life imprisonment without parole.
Despite the Oct. 7 attack against Israel that triggered its war on Hamas in Gaza and the bile of the current Trump presidential campaign, police have insisted from the beginning that Woll’s death was not a hate crime or a political crime. Woll was a founder of the Muslim-Jewish Forum of Detroit and had worked on a number of Democratic campaigns.
Now, they call it one of opportunity against a random victim by a prowler who had been breaking into cars nearby. Police found blood in her living room and in a trail that led to her body on a nearby lawn. She suffered eight stab wounds.
The prosecutor’s office said Woll’s blood also was found on a jacket owned by the accused at the home of his girlfriend. They also say they have electronic surveillance evidence of his whereabouts in the vicinity around the time of the crime.
Investigators discovered him only recently in a burglary investigation.
“What all that evidence tells us is that the defendant stabbed Samantha Woll to death during a home invasion during a crime of opportunity late at night,” said assistant prosecutor Ryan Elsey, according to the report in the News. “He was creeping around the neighborhood in the middle of the night, stealing things out of cars and she unfortunately left her front door open that night.”
After officials debunked speculation that her death had religious or political motives, some citizens nevertheless wondered whether this homicide might have been a crime of passion committed by someone known to the victim.
But law enforcement authorities also dismissed this theory and found no prior connection between the accused and the victim.
According to the News, Jackson-Bolanos displays on his right forearm a tattoo that says “God Forgives I Don’t.” The report also said he served four years in the Michigan prison system for concealing stolen property. Behind bars, he recorded 40 violations, some for assaults.
Come what may, history teaches that it is sometimes dangerous to jump to conclusions in high-profile crime cases, especially those with extra edge when the victim is female and the deed includes a racial component.
For instance:
In New York City, in April of 1989, a young, white, female investment banker went for a run in Central Park and was raped, beaten, and left for dead. Police soon charged five Harlem teenagers of color with the crime and the media reacted with animal imagery.
“WOLFPACK’S Prey,” screamed a headline in the New York Daily News. “Female jogger near death after savage attack by roving gangs.” (She lived, but couldn’t recall the attack.)
In reaction, Trump — then a local real-estate wheeler-dealer — reacted by buying full-page ads in all the local newspapers that implied that guys like these should be executed.
“Bring back the death penalty,” Trump said in the headline of the ad. “Bring back our police!”
After conviction, the five men served sentences of 6-13 years in prison before they were exonerated in 2002 after a different convict confessed to the solo crime when he was linked to it by DNA evidence. The five men unfairly convicted sued the city and shared $41 million.
Had Trump’s wishes been obeyed in the passion of that moment, the unfairly accused young men might have been put to death by the state or lynched by a mob.
When asked years later to apologize while he was President, Trump refused.
“They admitted their guilt,” Trump said. “You have people on both sides of that.”
Of course, it is best to avoid rash judgment or false equivalence in any case. Certainly, the evidence in the Lafayette Park case seems stronger now than that of Central Park then. But, come to think of it, the New York case seemed solid, too, back then, until, at long last, it fell apart. I remember it vividly. I moved there that year.
In this case from Detroit’s near east side, let’s hope for a speedy, fair trial, with full presentation of all relevant facts and evidence followed by a dispassionate decision as to guilt or innocence.
In the meantime, in a city hoping for a residential revival in the downtown area, Detroiters will lock our doors and our windows while we wonder just who might be out there, loose in the night.
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