“A 50-year-old Queens man was quarreling with a 32-year-old friend known as ‘Blotie’ inside of his apartment in the Woodside Houses on Broadway around 11 p.m. Friday,” nydailynews.com reports. “The argument spilled into the hallway when where the younger man produced a gun . . . [The man] ran back into their apartment and grabbed a foot-long replica sword from the wall and chased the gunman down the stairs. The older man stabbed the armed man, who shot him twice as the two fought just outside of the building’s front door.” The sword-wielding Queens resident died of his injuries. [h/t DD]
I had to go read the article to confirm that drugs and/or booze was involved.
First line of the story told the tale: drugs.
You can’t see it, but this is my shocked face.
Yeeeep. It wouldn’t have surprised me in one of them beat the other to death (if they didn’t find a kitchen knife to stab each other with) if they didn’t have weapons readily available. Drugs and alcohol do nasty things to what makes us human.
Don’t run back to your apartment to retrieve a “foot-long replica sword” and bring it to a gun fight.
Wow… just wow… oh RF enjoy your vacation and you know actually vacate as in quit workin and rock out with the kids!
Foot long replica sword= letter opener. Putz.
Great title!
Ahhhh… My old stomping grounds… I do miss Donovan’s Pub over in Woodside, but that’s about it.
I used to hang out in the Space Bar. Those were good times then.
“Foot long replica sword,” you mean a crappy dagger made of stainless steel, possibly a replica of a fantasy design that would be horrible in a real fight.
Bingo. Tag at purchase of Chunk O crap most likely said REAL SWORD, just like that in all caps…
The only time to bring a knife to gunfight is if the other guy is out of ammunition.
Or maybe if it’s not so much a knife as a lightsaber.
Ha, there’s a video where a guy tries to figure out just what a light saber would be good for. We know it can stop other light sabers and laser blasts but would it stop bullets or just leave you with quite a lot of vaporized lead hitting your face at a thousand feet per second?
There’s always that 10% that just don’t get the word! Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight!
There’s 10,000 of them every day! Today, he was one of the lucky 10,000, unfortunately he learned by experience…..
http://xkcd.com/1053/
Oh yeah! +1,000,000 for the XKCD reference.
@ Zora – What? NO! Not the people of this day and age! ./sarc
A foot long “SWORD” you say? To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee “that’s not a knife-now that’s a SWORD”.
The description here is backwards. The fight was *started* by the sword-wielder and after stabbing the dealer, the dealer shot him twice. No one left a gun fight to grab a sword.
There’s really no point to this post as the guy doing the shooting apparently didn’t pull a gun until he was stabbed. Even the police considered this as self defense.
of course once a guy with 20 priors gets all fixed up, he might have a few discussions with the cops about crack dealing and whether he cold legally carry but that’s for another day.
This is a TTAG non-story IMO.
“The stabbed dealer/gunman, who has more than 20 prior arrests for drugs, robbery, animal cruelty and stealing cars ……was in stable condition and not facing immediate charges because he apparently acted in self defense, police sources said.”
Seems like charges are due.
Yeah, wait a minute – getting stabbed by an idiot is an automatic pass for a CCW license in Queens since when?
You mean to tell me that a crack deal went badly? What are the odds of that 🙂
Wow. Ok, first, I never knew you could buy crack on credit. I’d have thought that was strictly a cash and carry business.
Beyond that, even if the dealer did act in self-defense, how is he not under arrest? How does anyone not super wealthy and politically connected get to carry a gun, let alone someone with 20 prior arrests for drugs, robbery, animal cruelty and stealing cars? There have to be some convictions in there somewhere.
Wouldn’t having to defend your self from a bad drug deal leave you on the hook for murder through that felony murder law? The one that hits you for murder when someone kills your partner during a robbery?
The felony murder rule imputes the death to any person committing an enumerated felony even if the death is caused by another. It’s a way of sticking a bad actor with consequences of an inherently dangerous felony when death is foreseeable, even if the BG didn’t directly cause the death or if he had no specific intent to kill.
The enumerated felonies usually include violent crimes, such as armed robberies, rapes etc. They are inherently dangerous crimes. A simple drug transaction would not be included.
That can be a tricky bit of legal territory. It’s called the law of parties, which as Ralph rightly refers to, would in this case apply to partners sharing joint responsibility for a murder committed in the process of their joint felony. It can get you the death penalty in a place like Texas, as I understand it, even if you didn’t pull the trigger.
In this case, I’m not sure whether drug deal itself counts as a felony, but felony possession of a firearm would, if the guy’s record met that threshold. Still, if it’s self-defense, then he’s clear on the homicide.
This issue has come up, particularly in Florida, in the context of stand your ground defenses. Some gangsters have argued that their killing of an opposing gang member was justified by SYG. That always struck me as b.s. because SYG only removes the duty to retreat. It doesn’t remove or alter the legal standards for self-defense.
Again, it can be tricky and, not being a lawyer, I couldn’t say definitively how it all plays out. My non-lawyer legal advice, take it for what it’s worth, is not to be a gangster a$$ thug going around doing a bunch of gangster a$$ stuff.
Never bring a knife to a crack fight
Didn’t that “Blotie” guy used to sing with the Hootfish?
I think you’re right, Ralph. I remember their hit “I only wanna bleed with you”.
Okay, I’m probably going to hell for that one. Sorry.
Gunfights have rules but, as far as I know, there’s only one.
A “foot-long replica of a sword”?! That sounds like a knife. A knife that looks like a sword is still a knife … unless this is the land of Lilliput (Gulliver’s Travels).
Who’s Blotie? The article says they killed Jose Feliciano.
I’m still trying to pick my jaw up off the floor when a guy with 20 convictions can use a gun to shoot an attacker in New York City and it’s called self defense by both the police and the media. I thought the Bloomburg rule was to wait until one of his “highly trained” police officers came to rescue you in about 20 minutes. All I can think of is how things have changed since Bernie Goetz
This story had me scratching my head until I read in the original article that it was an “ornamental dagger.” Very different from a sword and certainly not a real fighting knife. The guy with the gun is real lucky that the dead guy didn’t have a real knife and apparently didn’t know how to fight with one.
What does this have to do worth Indiana Jones?!?!?!?
It was a reference to the scene where the masked bad guy pulls out a big sword and swings it around for 10-20 seconds, threatening to dissect Indy. The hero finally tires of the display of fancy swordplay, draws his revolver, and shoots the bad guy (to the cheers of the crowd).
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