- March 21, 2016
- 11:30 am
- Al Gini
- no comments
Gini in a Bottle
It’s So Easy to Be a Bystander
Al Gini
“This, this was the thing that I had wanted to understand ever since the war. Nothing else. How a human being can remain indifferent. The executioners I understood; also the victims, though with more difficulty. For the others, all the others, those who were neither for nor against …those who were permanently and merely spectators-all those were closed to me, incomprehensible.” – Elie Wiesel
`Fifty-two years ago, on March 13, 1964 at about 3: 15 a.m., in Kew Gardens Queens, New York City, 28 year old Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, was brutally stabbed to death. Kitty was a bar manager at Ev’s Eleventh Hour Club, a small neighborhood bar, which was about five miles away from an apartment she shared with Mary Ann Zielonko at 82-70 Austin Street. Getting out of her car in the parking lot across the street from where she lived, Kitty realized that a man was following her and she began to run. Her attacker, Winston Moseley, was bigger and faster. He easily caught up with Kitty, who was just 5′ l” and 105 pounds, jumped on her back, pinned her to the ground, and stabbed her several times. For approximately thirty-five minutes, Moseley attacked Kitty three different times and inflicted numerous wounds. She was pronounced dead on arrival at Queens General Hospital. But according to the emergency room doctor, the first few knife wounds had not been fatal. What killed her were the twelve other wounds that she received during the course of her multiple attacks.
There are, at least, three factors that make Kitty Genovese’s death and murder especially heinous and unforgettable. To begin with it was a senseless and random act, that occurred without rhyme or reason. Moseley was driving by when Kitty got out of work and was getting into her car to drive home. Moseley just followed her. After he was captured he told police that “he had no reason to kill her … I uust] went out that night intending to kill a woman.” He said “I uust] had an uncontrollable urge to kill …”
The second startling aspect of this crime was its sheer brutality. In the course of the three separate stabbing events, Kitty endured at least seventeen separate wounds. When Moseley first pinned her down, he stabbed her numerous times in the back. The second time, she received multiple wounds in the chest. In the last attack, to stop her screaming, Moseley stabbed her in the neck at least once. Ms. Genovese did not die quickly or easily.
Finally, and most horribly, Kitty Genovese’s cries and death agonies were witnessed or heard by a significant number of individuals living in the apartment buildings surrounding the crime scene. From the moment Kitty began to run, she was calling for help. When Moseley first caught her she screamed, “Oh my God! He stabbed me! Please help me!
Please help me!” Lights went on, windows were raised, and a voice called down, “Hey, let that girl alone.” The robber walked away and stood in the shadows. When he came back he started stabbing Kitty again and she screamed, “I’m dying! I’m dying!” Again lights went on and windows were opened. Moseley withdrew again and moved out from under the lights to avoid identification. When he came back Kitty had made it to the rear of her apartment building. When he found her, by following her trail of blood, Kitty screamed again. “To shut her up,” Moseley stabbed her in the neck, reducing her cries to low groans and moaning. Moseley said windows were opened again, and he even heard a door open, but nothing happened. The yelling stopped, no one came down, and Moseley finished his ugly business and drove away.
Jeff Pearlman, Chicago Tribune reporter, wrote recently, “Four decades after her death, Kitty Genovese is remembered not so much as a human being but as a cultural catch phrase for inexcusable indifference. The term The Genovese Syndrome has now become synonymous with the dark side of urban existence. Too often we are too frightened, too alienated, too self-absorbed to get involved in helping a fellow human being in dire trouble.
Let’s be honest. Doing the right thing always involves some risk, always involves taking a chance, always involves extending ourselves for others. It’s hard to be a hero or to even just be of help to another. It’s easier to look away, walk away, pretend you didn’t notice. It’s easier to stay secluded within the “fortress of self ‘. It’s easier to lie to yourself by repeating again and again, “It’s really none of my business. “I don’t buy it. Doing nothing is something. Doing nothing makes us co-responsible. It is allowing and permitting the situation to happen. It is sanctioning the non-good by doing no-good, no-thing. In fact, to do nothing is to assist in the deed. As William James suggested, “The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.” Although the bottom line is rarely clear as to what we should do exactly, I think the bottom line still nevertheless requires us to do something!