The Tragedy of John White
October 14, 2008
Yes, they were wrong. Yes, they shouldn’t have been at John White’s house that night, but they were. And what you need to consider is how John White reacted to that. - Suffolk County, New York ADA James Chalifoux
By Cyd Malone
(Wyandanch, N.Y.) One thing is absolutely certain. On the night of August 9, 2006 Daniel Cicciaro Jr., 17 years of age, was shot and killed by John White, a 53-year-old man, on the front part of Mr. White’s property that lay within the town of Miller Place, Suffolk County. That much everyone agrees on.
What everyone does not agree on is the question of Mr. White’s pending life in a cage, a two to four year jail sentence to be exact. We as a society are punishing him for two things. First, for defending his family from attack, second, for the tool he used to do so. Some say he should be punished, some say he is a hero. But the laws that our legislature has passed weigh in with the former view; and like an umpire at a baseball game the politicians’ opinion is the only one that counts.
In the event you suffer from an intruder that enters your property, but stays out of the physical structure of your home, you are legally required to stand down, retreat inside, and wait for the police to arrive at some point in the future. Mr. White, showing a manly resolve that would have done our Founders proud, went out to meet his attackers armed, his armed son behind him.
Nobody disputes that it was his property that this mob of young men were invading, that Mr. White ordered them repeatedly to retreat off his land, or that they were threatening to do his son harm for the alleged crime of threatening to rape a girl, a charge later proved baseless. When one of the mob — Daniel Cicciaro — advanced on Mr. White and made a move towards his handgun, he fired.
By any rational argument Mr. White likely feared for the safety of his family, and such a feeling of fear would have been correct. It was later revealed that the mob of young men, having already tried and convicted his son on the drive over to his property, were moving their kangaroo court into its punishment phase.
The crime scene photos clearly show that Mr. White shot the assailant while the latter was on his property. I claim that he had every right before God, if not before Suffolk County law, to do so. While the law requires that we all retreat into our home, ceding our property to any attackers, I ask; if China invaded our country yet kept her armies away from our towns, villages, and cities, should the US military retreat into those areas and wait for a UN brokered peace? Of course that would be absurd. So why do we require it from Mr. White, when his country, his castle, is invaded? Why do we require such absurdity from ourselves? We are punishing Mr. White for a crime that no honorable man can excuse himself to obey.
As for the means Mr. White used to defend his property, his choice was a bad one considering Long Islanders’ fear of guns, as expressed by our laws – a fear not shared by any government employee. He used a handgun, one he had yet to get permission from the politicians to own.
The vicious, inflexible mind set our betters display towards those of the people who have the audacity to use a gun for their defense was given excellent clarity by the journalists covering the case and the government employees involved in Mr. White’s legal demise. For Suffolk County prosecutor Chalifoux to cast Mr. White’s character in a negative light simply because he was a “man who admitted keeping a shotgun in his bedroom, a handgun in his garage, and pickax handles in his car and front closet, all for safety” strikes me as ironic, especially considering the circumstances.
And hypocritical to boot, as there stood Prosecutor Chalifoux surrounded by a phalanx of his fellow government employees, many of them armed.
Even Newsday’s usually levelheaded Joye Brown asked, “why did John White keep guns and ammunition in his bedroom and garage in the first place?” For the same reason that any person would keep guns in the home – in the event that you and your family are, heaven forbid, confronted by a criminal or, heaven especially forbid, a mob of them. Guns are a cheap, effective means for law-abiding citizens, like Mr. White, to defend their property from criminal attack, to exercise a right that no rational man can deny his neighbor.
The fact that Mr. White and his assailant were of different races, combined with the sad American tradition of seeing every such meeting in stark emotional terms, led many to miss the real issue at stake here; a man’s right to defend his property, that most important piece of which is his very life and the lives of his family. This is not a matter of race, this is a matter of honor and liberty, and Mr. White is to be thrown in a cage for embodying the former and practicing the latter.
The legal attack on Mr. White by the Suffolk government is not only absurd and unjust for him personally but, if you live in Suffolk County, for you as well. It is imperative that we remember prosecutor Chalifoux’s ominous words “we all live by the same laws”. Indeed, we do. If Mr. White cannot protect his property and family from a mob of drunken, angry young men, that means that no homeowner in Suffolk County can.
As of this date, not one surviving member of the mob who assaulted Mr. White and his family has been charged with any crime at all – instead it is Mr. White, the victim, who stands to go to jail. In the late 1800s, looking about at the carnage of Jim Crow, the journalist Ida B. Wells exclaimed “the power of the State, country and city, the civil authorities and the strong arm of the military power were all on the side of the mob and lawlessness.”
How this incident brings her observation back to life — that is the true tragedy of John White.
Cyd Malone writes from Wyandanch, New York and may be contacted at peloponny1 (at) aol.com.
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Originally written: Sunday, December 23, 2007 3:10 PM
I’ve been following a couple of legal cases over the last few weeks that, although widely separated geographically, are both related insomuch as they deal with guns, racism, and the legal use of force to protect oneself.
The first, in Pasadena, Tx (a Houston suburb) relates to the shooting deaths of two undocumented Latinos (both with prior criminal records) who were killed after burglarizing a vacant home (this is undisputed).
You may be aware that Texas has what’s known as the “Castle Doctrine” also known as the “No Retreat” law which means that, contrary to ordinary use of force in self-defense laws, one does not need to ‘retreat’ to a point of no further safe retreat before using deadly force to protect oneself. Basically, if you feel you’re being threatened (and how threatened, and by what, is undefined), you’re entitled to use deadly force to protect yourself. Coupled with Texas’ ‘concealed-carry’ laws, it makes for very polite conversations held at very safe distances (Gun-toting Texans aim for ’shoot thy neighbor’ law).
A recent newspaper story reports: The Texas penal code says someone can use deadly force to protect a third party’s property. To do so, you have to meet certain conditions, one of which is “to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property.” ( New details in shooting of burglary suspects).
On Nov. 14th a White, 61 year-old, Pasadena resident, Joe Horn, noticed two people breaking into his neighbor’s home. He called 911 and got his shotgun. Here’s the 911 transcript:
…the audiotape of Mr. Horn’s 911 calls. In a low, calm and steady voice, he said he saw the men breaking in and asked: “I’ve got a shotgun; do you want me to stop them?”
The Pasadena emergency operator responded: “Nope. Don’t do that. Ain’t no property worth shooting somebody over, O.K.?”
Mr. Horn said: “But hurry up, man. Catch these guys will you? Cause, I ain’t going to let them go.”
Mr. Horn then said he would get his shotgun.
The operator said, “No, no.” But Mr. Horn said: “I can’t take a chance of getting killed over this, O.K.? I’m going to shoot.”
The operator told him not to go out with a gun because officers would be arriving.
“O.K.,” Mr. Horn said. “But I have a right to protect myself too, sir,” adding, “The laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it.”
The operator said, “You’re going to get yourself shot.” But Mr. Horn replied, “You want to make a bet? I’m going to kill them.”
Moments later he said, “Well here it goes, buddy. You hear the shotgun clicking and I’m going.”
Then he said: “Move, you’re dead.”
There were two quick explosions, then a third, and the 911 call ended.
“I had no choice,” Mr. Horn said when he called 911 back. “They came in the front yard with me, man.”
Captain Corbett said that a plainclothes officer had pulled up just in time to see Mr. Horn pointing his shotgun at both men across his front yard, that Mr. Ortiz had at one point started to run in a way that took him closer to Mr. Horn, and that both men “received gunfire from the rear.” ( Shootings Test Limits of New Self-Defense Law)
After the event Mr. Horn went into seclusion, to avoid the publicity, and a grand jury will determine whether or not he’s liable for any criminal charges. Lest one stereotype Mr. Horn as some gun-totin’ Texas vigilante yahoo he is… “according to his attorney… so overwrought with grief and overwhelmed by the media glare that he’s left his home… “Joe has never been anything but a gentle person. He’s not the type of monster that they are making him out to be” (Shooting of burglars in Texas draws debate). Perhaps his attempt to play ‘John Wayne’ resulted in his unexpected confrontation with the realities of taking human lives… who knows?
But, based upon the apparent facts, and Texas law, as well as Texan’s well-known bent for ‘lawnorder’, the fact that the two victims were Latinos - not a plus amongst many White Texans, were known criminals - another ‘not a plus’, and were also undocumented immigrants (known in Texas’ polite circles as ‘illegal aliens’) - another major ‘not a plus’ - it seems unlikely that Mr. Horn will suffer any legal consequences of his actions, regardless of what happens within his own conscience.
Meanwhile…
In Riverhead, NY a 54 year-old Black man, John White (go figure…), was convicted of 2nd degree manslaughter yesterday following the shooting death of a 17 year-old White youth on Aug. 9th, 2006 (NY Man Guilty in Death of White Teen).
It seems Mr. White’s 19 year-old son, Aaron, had been at a party where some White kids had determined (wrongly) that Aaron had put up a YouTube video in which he was supposed to have threatened to rape one of the White girls at the party. The outraged White youths chased Aaron home, where they drove their cars up toward the house, leaving their lights on, facing the home.
Aaron got his Dad who‘d been asleep and, rejecting a shotgun in the house, picked up a handgun from his garage and confronted a White youth in his yard and, here, the reports all seem to be vague… did the shooting occur on Mr. White’s property and, if so, what was the victim doing on it? (a point this Op-Ed appears to resolve) Regardless, the confrontation, that included the youth & his friends shouting racial epithets, ended with the youth being shot, point blank, in the face and dying.
White’s attorneys have referred to Cicciaro [the victim] and his friends as a violent and racist “lynch mob,” and maintain the gun went off accidentally when a drunken Cicciaro grabbed for it (Jury asks to hear testimony again in Miller Place case).
Mr. White’s actions were explained as follows:
John White grew up hearing stories from family members about the racial hatred of the Deep South, including the Ku Klux Klan’s torching of his grandfather’s business in Alabama in the 1920s.
So when white teenagers showed up on his Long Island doorstep last year, spewing racial epithets… he feared he was about to be attacked by a lynch mob. He grabbed a gun and, after an argument with the group, fatally shot one of the teens.
The case has been… marked by White’s emotional testimony as he recalled memories of racial violence from his family’s past. He recalled seeing the headlights of the teenagers’ cars on that night in 2006 and thinking the worst.
“In my family history, that’s how the Klan comes,” White said. “They pull up. They blind you with their lights.” He broke down in tears on the podium, insisting: “I didn’t mean to shoot this young man. This young man was another child of God.” (NY Man on Trial in Slaying of White Teen).
The prosecutor made the point that the attack on Mr. White’s grandfather occurred 30 years before Mr. White was born and that the KKK aspect didn’t come up until the case came to trial. The story didn’t say when he expected it to come up if not at trial.**
At any rate, Mr. White’s sentencing is still pending with a potential of 5 - 15 years. He remains free, on bail, and his attorney says they intend to appeal the verdict (which nearly resulted in a hung jury).
So, here’s the paradox: In Texas, a White man kills two non-whites who pose no threat to his life, limb, or property and will likely suffer no consequences for it while, in New York state, a non-white man kills a White youth who is on his property, drunk, posing a direct threat, in the company of other threatening supporters, but he is at risk of imprisonment.
When I started writing this I thought I’d have to elucidate the conclusions more succinctly but, as I re-read this, they’re all too evidently clear as is…
** That may well be the case but, for myself, the impact of the Nazis on my family (even though they were never in Nazi Germany or threatened by Nazis they were, however, threatened by the Klan) is such that, even today, I suffer a very visceral response even to films of modern-day neo-Nazis & skinheads and, on those few occasions when I’ve been in proximity with them, I recognize impulses that only Rabbi Meyer Kahane would have approved of. I hate to think of how I might respond were I confronted in my home by a mob of shouting, threatening, skinhead neo-Nazis. I can easily place myself in Mr. White’s shoes.
Addendum 10.l20.08:
Mr. Horn’s case was presented to a Houston, TX grand jury who, on July 1, 2008, refused to indict him for any crime.
Quanell X, a local black activist commented: “There is not a snowflake’s chance in hell that an African-American man could do what Joe Horn did and get away with it…”
He couldn’t be more right.
- Posted by: Marshalldoc
That snowflake wouldn’t melt in the slightest if I, a white male of forty-two years, were on the jury. I am a firm believer of EQUAL rights for ALL Americans.
Unfortunately, and I say this with absolutely zero bias, the black Americans, (not ALL of them of course); in today’s society, help keep racism alive.
There is not one American alive today that has owned a slave. I’m sure that MY ancestors did not own other human beings, we, as a family, (even if we condoned the practice), didn’t have the money to do so.
How many blacks today can tell you that the first Africans to arrive in this country did so, on a Dutch Man-O-War in the year 1619 at the Virginia Colonies, or that African slaves were purchased from OTHER Africans that enslaved them? Why is it that a forty-plus white male knows this, yet those who still lament their history are completely ignorant of it?
Why do I turn on The Comedy Channel to watch Eddie Griffin, whom I fully expected to be hilarious, only to turn it off in disgust after two minutes because every other word out of his mouth was “nigger”?
Do you REALLY expect me to believe that an entire race of people have a special word that only they can use without reprisals? What kind of idiot do you think I am? I’m afraid that you have misjudged me.
EVERYONE’S ancestors were slaves at one time or another. Today’s black hate mongers are claiming unjust treatment against people who are long dead, by people who are long dead.
There are friends of my family who are African American, whom I love as though they were my own family. There are also those who are pathetic losers who were taught to blame the color of skin for their own shortcomings.
Slavery is over, it’s been over, and guess what? It’s not MY fault that it happened. As a people, it’s time for you to man up. It’s time for you to stop whining and pissing your own pants. It’s time for you to let racism die. It’s time for you to act like the proud people that your original ancestors on the African continent were. Stop spiting in the faces of the ancestors you claim to cherish. Unfortunately, I think that many of you would be shunned by them today as a bunch of whining pussies.
In today’s society, you have more opportunity than I.
So, get over it.
- Posted by: George Van Aken