I'd Kill For A Pizza!
It's been a few weeks since we here at the Blotter have noticed any real crime trends (apart from hit-and-run drivers and people being set on fire). But last week it was hard to ignore the rampant food-related violence. Whatever people chose to eat last week-burgers, barbecue, pizza-it all came with a side order of death!
At 21, you'd think Jersey City resident Jarvis Bradford is old enough to know that eating fast food will kill you, despite what those new commercials are saying. He was waiting to order at the McDonald's take-out window at 125th & B'way Sunday when some guy, for some unknown reason, allegedly walked up to him and blew him away.
Police, at present, have no solid leads that we're aware of.
The previous night, food played a central role in another local homicide. Linell Plair (whose hip-hop name was "Deli Ray") was at a big annual cookout in a Crown Heights parking lot. By all accounts he was having a fine old time with the barbecue and what have you, until 10:15 rolled around. That's when two uninvited guests showed up. The men didn't bring any homemade coleslaw or potato salad. They didn't even have the common courtesy to bring a case of beer. They did bring guns, though, and blew Plair away, once again, for some unknown reason.
About two hours before Mr. Plair was shot, a number of families were celebrating things-fourth birthdays and the like-at that old celebratory standby, Chuck E. Cheese. The theme restaurant, located in Brooklyn's Atlantic Terminal Mall, was crowded as usual on Saturday night. Maybe too crowded.
Shortly after 8, it's reported, two young girls-it's unclear whether they knew each other-allegedly got into a slap fight. Well that wouldn't do, not during a happy party time, so the girls' mothers stepped in. But instead of breaking up the fight, they started punching each other. A minute later, things escalated even further: Four adult men allegedly joined the fracas, a couple of them pulling knives.
The free-for-all spread across the restaurant like something out of an old Western. That's when aspiring cop Lindon Ramsey and his friend Ali Parchment-their families were celebrating Parchment's son's fifth birthday-reportedly jumped in the middle of it all in an effort to break things up.
It didn't really work so well, and both men ended up stabbed. Whoever stabbed Ramsey, in fact, apparently stuck the knife into him and then ripped it up his side. In the end, it took 15 surgical staples to close up his various organs, but he'll be okay.
(It's unclear what the guy in the mouse suit was doing during all this, or what song the animatronic animals were performing.)
Canarsie resident Neron Banks was arrested at the restaurant and charged with assault, weapons possession, and ruining everybody's fun. The other celebrants fled the scene.