https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2023/10/02/philly-journalist-who-downplayed-crime-is-killed-in-his-own-home-n2629218Progressive
Philly Journalist Who Downplayed City's Crime Is Shot and Killed
Julio Rosas
October 02, 2023 4:30 PM

Philadelphia journalist Josh Kruger was shot and killed at his home in the
Point Breeze neighborhood overnight, with police saying they do not
currently have an suspects.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports before 1:30 in the morning, police
responded to reports of gunshots and screams on the 2300 block of Watkins
Street. Outside, officers found Josh Kruger shot multiple times and
collapsed in the street. Despite being rushed to the hospital, he
succumbed to his severe injuries just before 2:15 a.m.

Kruger recently posted on his Facebook account someone came to his house
searching for their boyfriend — "a man I’ve never met once in my entire
life.” The person called themselves “Lady Diabla, the She-Devil of the
Streets” and threatened him.

In addition to writing for different local outlets in Philadelphia, Kruger
was a former city spokesperson. On his X account, Kruger often downplayed
the crime crisis in the city, along with criticizing conservatives for
pointing out the problem, including days leading up to his death.

[continues]

--
Dead or Alive Data Base
http://www.doadb.com

On Tuesday, October 3, 2023 at 10:04:29 AM UTC-4, Travoltron wrote:
> got himself murdered.

You could have just said "got murdered," you know.

I never hear anyone say "he got himself robbed."

On a tangent: as a teen, I didn't like to take risks. A good thing, too, because back then, no one ever talked to me about alcohol, for one.

I also liked solitude, so peer pressure wasn't really a factor for me. (That's a big reason I don't have kids; I would never be able to sympathize regarding all the awful things that peer pressure can lead to, such as shoplifting clothes that you can't afford just because you'll be shunned if you don't wear such clothes.)

But we should never lose sight of the fact that when it comes to crime VICTIMS, there's a big difference between being stupid and being guilty, even if every law-abiding citizen chooses to walk in packs and never stay out after sunset. As Katha Pollitt once wrote: " 'The complainant showed incredibly bad judgment, Your Honor,' is not a legal defense."

On 10/3/2023 7:53 AM, Lenona wrote:
> I also liked solitude, so peer pressure wasn't really a factor for me.
> (That's a big reason I don't have kids; I would never be able to
> sympathize regarding all the awful things that peer pressure can lead
> to, such as shoplifting clothes that you can't afford just because
> you'll be shunned if you don't wear such clothes.)

Did you have to do the thing in school where you carry an egg or bag of
flour around for a week and pretend it's a baby? I think that nonsense
only made smart kids not want to have kids and went totally over the
heads of the dumb ones.

It sounds like you and I led very similar lives, but I regret living a
low-risk life now. I see all my friends on Facebook posting all these
happy pictures of their spouses and kids and I feel awful. I can lie to
myself and say I'm better off with no responsibilities, but I don't
believe it.

On Tuesday, October 3, 2023 at 11:07:51 AM UTC-4, Travoltron wrote:

> Did you have to do the thing in school where you carry an egg or bag of
> flour around for a week and pretend it's a baby? I think that nonsense
> only made smart kids not want to have kids and went totally over the
> heads of the dumb ones.
>
> It sounds like you and I led very similar lives, but I regret living a
> low-risk life now. I see all my friends on Facebook posting all these
> happy pictures of their spouses and kids and I feel awful. I can lie to
> myself and say I'm better off with no responsibilities, but I don't
> believe it.

My sympathies. While I don't know exactly which decisions you're regretting, just keep in mind what blogger "Sylvia D. Lucas" said (not verbatim):

"How can there be any truly regretful LONGING for something that was never, until now, a desire?"

OK, maybe that doesn't really describe you.

I also seem to remember that you're almost young enough to be a millennial.

But when it comes to 50-, 60- or 70-year-olds who never really wanted children - and sometimes didn't even try to find the right spouse to have/adopt with, if they suddenly want kids to play with, all that really means is, they want the fun without the work. That is not true regret. (In the same vein, anyone would love to boast about having climbed Mt. Everest, but very few want the training work, expense or danger of doing so.)

People who are simply lonely have to work to change that. Making friends often takes years, so one has to start early, whether one is looking for a spouse or not.

And no, I never had sex ed at my boarding school. (I'm not sure why not, exactly, other than that it was the 1980s.) But I don't regret that; as far as I was concerned, sitting in such a class would have been a big invasion of my emotional privacy. Any religion forced on me would have felt the same, so I'm very glad I never had to endure that either. (I read pretty much everything I needed to know from "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives.")

I'm not sure why my mother (who was VERY far away from my school, so I think I went for more than a year without seeing her, sometimes) didn't talk to me about boys, alcohol or birth control. Maybe it was because she knew I didn't like to take risks; maybe she felt it was my job to learn everything on my own by that age. Like money management or housekeeping. She wasn't a hands-on type; she didn't really talk about things like politics or religion to her kids either. But at least that way, we were less likely to rebel against what SHE believed in those areas of life.

But enough about me - let's get back to the actual subject of this thread!!

On 10/3/2023 7:04 AM, Travoltron wrote:
> But looking at this guy's Twitter, I wonder if this was related to his
> dangerous gay lifestyle. Dude bragged about his HIV+ status on his
> Twitter bio.
>
> Reminds me of radio personality Mike Webb in Seattle, who was bringing
> random homeless druggies home for sex and got himself murdered.

I was right. The killer was a teen that this queer had been molesting
since the age of 15.

https://www.inquirer.com/crime/josh-kruger-robert-davis-philadelphia-shooting-20231011.html

I hope the teen is acquitted.

I knew the late Mike Webb, and though for a good while adjacent to him broadcast-wise at KIRO, I was never personally close to him (and quite content to not be, as he was a rather angry sort of fellow off-air AND on-, whom it was widely believed he kept a loaded pistol in that hard-case black attache' I never once saw him not carrying). Indeed, for a good while, Webb's 10pm-1am time-slot immediately preceded my own six-nights-a-week 1-5am broadcast at KIRO Newstalk Radio.

One reason Webb didn't like me much was that during the quickie "hand-off" chat we would often do--a couple of minutes of my sitting-in in the final segment of his shift to "billboard" [i.e., giving the listeners an idea of what I'd be covering in the upcoming show, hoping to retain as much of the audience show-to-show as possible] my own broadcast--he was, as a hard-core Fab Four fan who often talked about The Beatles on his show, talking about George and Ringo's performances at the Concerts for Bangla-Desh.

Only Webb didn't know there were TWO all-star concerts on Sunday, August 1, 1971 at Madison Square Garden. (Though it's true that that earlier, afternoon show was originally slated to be on Saturday night, July 31st--but was rescheduled for Sunday afternoon, for reasons that decades later is still are disputed among the surviving organizers.) Both the triple album on Beatles-label Apple Records and the documentary film preserving the event, are from that second, evening show, not the first, afternoon performance (though a rough-hewn audience tape of at least Dylan's five-song afternoon performance has been circulating among Dylan collectors ever since 1973).

Anyway, Webb at first accused me on air of being mistaken when I corrected him--for his audience's benefit, not merely to one-up my colleague on-air!--that there in fact had been TWO stagings of the event, though as I told Webb, Harrison seldom if ever highlighted that fact when discussing his trend-setting benefit concerts in later interviews. I even offered to bring into the studio the next day a copy I'd duplicate for him of Dylan's afternoon set. At which point Webb then granted to the audience that, "Well, Bryan sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but I've never heard that before."

Webb then told me off the air during the newsbreak prior to my show that he didn't need to hear the tape I offered him--he wasn't much of a Dylan fan, I gathered--and then Webb was even MORE frosty to me after that segment than he'd pretty always been previously, ever since management first introduced me to him when I arrived at KIRO from Albuquerque in March 2005. And soon enough thereafter Webb was fired by KIRO**, and months after that dead--by the hatcheted-hand of a homeless acquaintance Webb was kind enough to let stay at his home for weeks on end.

I'd summarize by saying That's showbiz!...except there's nothing funny about murder.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
==================* Dylan's afternoon five-song set differed HUGELY in performance--and slightly in song selection, too--from his night-time set, doing "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" (rather than "Mr. Tambourine Man" which was rendered for the evening audience), and also shuffled the sequence of his five tunes a bit as well. Dylan sounds QUITE inebriated throughout that earlier performance, an admittedly-cynical supposition which was later confirmed in an interview by none other than the late Phil Spector, whom Harrison had personally dispatched to Dylan's Greenwich Village townhouse to shanghai Dylan uptown to MSG after the often-in-those-days-unreliable Dylan failed to show up...even though Dylan WAS there for rehearsal of a couple not-performed-at-either-show duets with Harrison much earlier.)
** After Webb brazenly violated strict KIRO policy by briefly deserting his show and driving up the street two blocks on Eastlake Avenue during a news break one subsequent night, incurring a fender-bender in his uninsured auto during his hasty, tasty food-run sojourn, and later the next day forging an on-line insurance policy claiming he'd been insured prior to that minor parking-lot collision. (If it seems like I'm imagining or even exaggerating any of this, both the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported these sordid details over the following months; Webb certainly never personally filled me in on any of this.)

ADDENDUM re The Concerts for Bangla-Desh:

If you were lucky enough to attend the earlier, afternoon Bangla-Desh shindig at Madison Square Garden AND you saved your ticket as a memory of the affair, a quick check of your stub will confirm it says, "Saturday, July 31, 1971"...because the switcheroo from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon was so close to the performance weekend that there wasn't time for new tickets to be printed and distributed.

STYBLE/Florida

On 10/12/2023 1:13 PM, radioacti...@gmail.com wrote:
> If it seems like I'm imagining or even exaggerating any of this, both
> the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported these
> sordid details over the following months

I vaguely remember this and just being elated that he was fired,
whatever the reason. Then his murder sort of overshadowed it all.

I haven't listened to KIRO ever since Dori died.

Travoltron <Travoltron@fakeemail.com> wrote:
>On 10/3/2023 6:39 AM, David Carson wrote:

>. . .

>Reminds me of radio personality Mike Webb in Seattle, who was bringing
>random homeless druggies home for sex and got himself murdered.

After this point in the thread, a number of you began discussing Mike
Webb. Could you please change Subject as your followups are no longer
discussing Josh Kruger? Thank you.

On 10/3/2023 6:39 AM, David Carson wrote:
> https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2023/10/02/philly-journalist-who-downplayed-crime-is-killed-in-his-own-home-n2629218
I really hate this sort of navel-gazing person. "Well _I_ haven't been
mugged, so clearly there is no crime problem!" Total lack of empathy for
others.

But looking at this guy's Twitter, I wonder if this was related to his
dangerous gay lifestyle. Dude bragged about his HIV+ status on his
Twitter bio.

Reminds me of radio personality Mike Webb in Seattle, who was bringing
random homeless druggies home for sex and got himself murdered.