This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 28, 2011 - On Saturday, April 16, 72-year-old Hoang Nguyen was murdered in broad daylight while walking through an alley in south St. Louis. His 59-year-old wife, Yen, suffered a broken eye socket during the assault.
The couple had taken a shortcut from a neighborhood market to their nearby apartment, carrying home their weekly supply of groceries when they were set upon by two teen-age males accompanied by two females. Security cameras that recorded the attack confirm that the violence was unprovoked.
Because the victims were Vietnamese immigrants and their assailants were black, initial reports speculated that the incident might have been a hate crime. Police officials quickly discounted that motive, provoking skepticism in some quarters where it was felt that an unwritten rule precluded the hate crime designation for assaults where the suspects -- rather than the victims -- were black. It seemed that black victims of racism fit the script; blacks exhibiting racial hatred did not.
Four days after the crime, 18-year-old Elex Levell Murphy was arrested and charged with murdering Hoang and assaulting Yen. The subsequent interrogation of Elex indicated that the cops had been right after all. The elderly, unarmed man had not been beaten to death and his wife sent to the hospital because of racial animus -- this was done for sport. Somehow, that finding did little to comfort the community.
Turns out the young people were allegedly playing "knockout" -- an urban pastime in which an unsuspecting stranger is savagely attacked for the pure, unbridled existential joy of felony assault. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce summarized the general reaction to this news when she said, "What makes people decide this is a good thing to do? I'm as at a loss for an explanation as the rest of the community. It's just crazy; it's so outrageous."
Outrageous is as good an adjective as any to describe the slaughter of Mr. Nguyen, but it shouldn't have come as such a surprise because incidents like this were predicted in exacting detail decades ago.
In 1972, Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" premiered. A cinematic adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel of the same name, the film was instantly controversial and generated its own fair share of outrage. It told the tale of Little Alex and his merry mates -- called "droogs" -- visiting rape and mayhem upon residents of London and its environs. The gang's name for such activities was "ultra-violence"; extreme violence perpetrated for its own sake. The film's setting was in the near future -- or, right about now.
Critical reaction to Kubrick's movie was mixed though certainly not nuanced. It was alternately characterized as high art or pornographic trash. Time magazine's movie critic panned it harshly in one issue. The next week, its art critic wrote a counter-review extolling it as one of the most important films ever made.
Visually stunning and mercilessly cold, the sex and violence were both stylized and graphic. If you didn't find at least some of the images depicted to be disturbing, you're probably in need of professional help or, perhaps, an exorcism. Suffice it to say that its audience would never listen to "Singing in the Rain" in the same way again ...
Morality or the complete lack thereof notwithstanding, history has shown the dark vision of Burgess and Kubrick to be deadly accurate. At his arraignment, knock-out murder suspect, Elex, seemed puzzled by the attention the case had drawn -- after all, he'd only been playing a game.
For their part, Alex's droogs seemed to change size from one scene to the next. Waylaying a defenseless drunk in a deserted alley, they appeared to be "large and in charge." Taken into police custody, they shrank back to adolescent boys in need of proper instruction.
A liberal might view Alex as an innately good kid who'd been corrupted by an unjust society. A conservative might see him as an extreme example of base instinct allowed to run amok. Personally, I'd refer to William Golding's seminal "Lord of the Flies" for guidance.
As Golding's marooned schoolboys demonstrated, the adolescent intellect tends to create its own feral reality when left unrestrained by the influence of responsible adults. Alex's prior offenses had resulted in a series of stern warnings and probated second chances. The facile indifference of civil authorities combined with a functional lack of parental control allowed him to live in a world defined by juvenile fantasy. Only when he finally kills someone does the system get serious with him -- and by then, it was far too late.
I don't know murder defendant Elex, but I suspect I know his type. I'd wager that he's the product of an inner-city subculture where responsible adults are like unicorns -- everybody's heard of them but nobody's actually seen one. And when society allows boys to be boys, they all too often turn into droogs.
M.W. Guzy is a retired St. Louis cop who currently works for the city Sheriff's Department. His column appears weekly in the Beacon.