ALL THE PRETTY VICTIMS

The murder of Nicole DuFresne was a deplorable and cowardly act carried out by a scared kid desperate to prove his manhood to his friends. At the same time, it's also clear that Ms. DuFresne had been living in this city long enough to know better (drunk or not) than to challenge a jittery mugger with a gun. In any case, it shouldn't have happened, but it did.

But you know what? It happens every day. Every single day in New York, people are beaten, stabbed, gunned down like animals for no reason at all. The very night Nicole DuFresne was shot and killed, another man was shot and killed on the street, too. He lived in Bed-Stuy.

Over the course of the week following Ms. DuFresne's low-rent murder, at least six other people were shot and killed under similar circumstances within the five boroughs. (Those are just the gunshot fatalities, and the number is far below average for that stretch of time.)

Yet if you read the papers or watched the news, what did you see every single day last week? Pictures of Nicole. Surveillance photos of her assailants. A 24-hour blow-by-blow of the police investigation. More pictures of Nicole. By Monday, the case had hit the national wires. On Wednesday, the Post ran a story concerning the fact that the shooter, Rudy Fleming, shit his pants the first time he was arrested. The DuFresne story was inescapable.

So what about those other people who were shot and killed? In most instances, they received three lines in the Post's Crime Blotter, but no mention at all in any of the other papers. In some cases, the names were never reported. They became, in the truest sense, nothing but statistics.

Why's that? We should all know the answer to that one: Those other victims were black or Hispanic and lived in poor neighborhoods where that sort of thing is "commonplace." The people who shot and killed them may or may not be caught one of these days; it doesn't really matter. Not to the people reading the papers or watching the news, at least.

But Nicole! She was pretty. She was white. She was an "aspiring actress." She had a nice head shot that made people feel bad that she was dead. It's always sad when pretty people die while they're still pretty.

We found the whole circus obvious and grotesque.

For the record, we are mocking neither Nicole DuFresne nor her untimely death here, but rather the spectacle the media made of it, and why. Nor is this an issue of kneejerk political correctness on our part. It's just that we've seen this happen time and time again, locally and nationally. Why was the Laci Peterson case national news? Or JonBénet Ramsey, or this?

Remember the "aspiring model" whose shoulder was grazed by a bullet in the subway last year? The papers were still playing that one long after it was revealed that the shooting was a simple accident and not a crime. Was it because someone was shot on the subway? Of course not-hardly a week goes by when that doesn't happen. It was because someone pretty and white was shot on the subway.

What it boils down to is this: if you're not young and white and blonde and some sort of aspiring actress or model, and you end up getting murdered, you can go ahead and kiss those fantasies of post-mortem fame goodbye, because no one's ever going to hear about you.