Latest news with #urbanviolence
Daily Mail
04-08-2025
- Daily Mail
Outraged CEO shows Daily Mail the hellish truth about downtown Cincinnati in wake of man-on-woman brawl that shocked America
An entrepreneur who is fleeing downtown Cincinnati in the wake of an appalling mass brawl showed Daily Mail the abject squalor that has driven him out. Victor Louis, founder and CEO of local firm One Logistics Network, took the Mail on a grim tour of the beleaguered city on Monday. He said Cincinnati's woke leaders were entirely to blame for its demise. The city has been thrust into the national spotlight following the mass brawl that erupted, with a man and a woman being violently assaulted during a fight that saw the woman beaten black and blue by a man. Further outrage ensued when Cincinnati Police Chief Teresa Theetge - who is being sued for alleged anti-white racism - scolded journalists for taking the viral clips 'out of context' Louis told Daily Mail that the brawl was the straw that broke the camel's back for his company after he and his staffers witnessed escalating violence and horror. He said that: 'Had [the brawl] not happened, I don't know if anybody would believe what's been going on. In one sense it is an isolated incident but things have led up to this.' Cincinnati is home to eight Fortune 500 headquarters - but during rush hour on Monday morning its streets were near-desolate. And the people that Daily Mail did see paint a clear picture of why Louis and others are so angry. Just a few hundred feet from the grandiose and historic City Hall a young woman, around 20-years-old, was seen injecting herself with with a syringe. Next to her, a mans arm gushed with blood, having also just shot up in Cincinnati's downtown - with no consequences. The brazen display was not a surprise for Louis. 'That's in broad daylight, right by City Hall. Literally someone can look out their window and see this, and nothing is being done', he told the Daily Mail. 'If you can't fix that, why do you think crime circulates. And that was right in front of us, there is no hiding, that girl was also very young.' He continued: 'Nobody is walking the beat, those people are camped out there. That was blatant, and they aren't even hiding it.' Other Cincinnati vagrants were seen smoking from glass pipes commonly used to get high on crack, meth or fentanyl. In one particularly jarring moment, a woman sat on a park bench injected herself with drugs in full view of churchgoers gathering outside their house of worship for a service. Louis had issued a letter to local leaders last week after the viral clip of the brawl made headlines, saying he was officially done with the downtown district - and was moving his business, which employs 35 people, to the suburbs. 'It's been issue after issue', he added. Louis said his employees no longer feel safe working in the area, adding that: 'They don't want to come down to work here here anymore'. The most recent sight to sicken Louis was that of a homeless person who yanked down their pants on a sidewalk near his office to defecate. Others regularly tote weapons while strutting around streets which were once home to bustling shops, offices, restaurants and bars. The 39-year-old added: 'The city doesn't control violent crime, and they can't maintain litter, and they can't maintain vagrancy. Guess what? Those things just run rampant. And that's what we are seeing around the city. 'When you can't fix these problems like littering and drug abuse, you're not going to be able to fix violent crime. Why ask people to play chess when they can't even play checkers?' Just last week a woman was shot in the neck and leg in the Over the Rhine neighborhood in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Before that, hundreds of youths had swamped a 4th of July celebration and burned a police officer with a firework. Louis also mentioned the killing of fellow Cincinnati business owner Patrick Heringer. He was murdered in his own home in the city in June, while protecting his family from an intruder who stabbed him multiple times. Mordecia Black, 38, was indicted in his death and other charges including aggravated burglary and felonious assault. It later emerged that Black was a convicted felon and had cut his ankle monitor off earlier this year before vanishing from a halfway house. He had managed to evade police for months before allegedly killing Heringer. In an open letter Louis wrote last week, he added: 'A consistent decline in the conditions for doing business in the city over the past several years has made our continued presence untenable,' he wrote. 'My employees have concerns about their safety and do not feel valued for their contributions to the city.' Louis is not alone in his concerns. The Cincinnati Restaurant Industry clubbed together to issue their own statement on the brawl and the spat of other issues facing the area. They said: 'The video circulating from that night is disturbing, and like many in this city, we are calling for accountability and decisive action. 'Our businesses represent thousands of employees and serve tens of thousands of guests each week. 'We've invested heavily in this city - not just financially, but with our time, presence and long-term commitment to Cincinnati's success. 'But we cannot carry this alone. We need clear, proactive, and correctives measures from our city leadership. This is not a moment for vague promises or delayed responses. 'Our community is asking for a real plan, one that addresses this incident and the broader safety concerns that have been raised for months.' On Friday, Mayor Aftab Pureval said that he would be increasing law enforcement patrols in the city. On Monday the Mail didn't see any police presence in the downtown area, where open drug abuse was the order of the day. Pureval added: 'There is no place for violent crime in Cincinnati, whether it's a fight or gun violence. 'We will pursue those responsible and we will hold them accountable no matter who they are.' In her first remarks since the assault, Holly, who is still severely bruised, said it has left her with trauma to the brain. In an emotional message, she said: 'I want to say thank you to everyone for all of the love and support. 'It's definitely what's keeping me going. And you have just brought back faith in humanity. 'It's been very, very hard, and I'm still recovering. I still have a very bad brain trauma. God bless you all. Thank you.' Political commentator Benny Johnson shared the video to his X profile after he organized an online fundraiser for her, which has already raised $168,000. According to the page Holly is a single working-class mother and is out of work due to her injuries as well as living in an undisclosed location due to threats on her life. The update from Holly comes after a fourth person was arrested in connection with the fight. Dominique Kittle, 37, was taken into police custody on Friday night and was charged with felonious assault and aggravated riot, his bond was set at $150,000. He appeared in court on Saturday where his lawyer told the judge that suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, according to WLWT. Jermaine Matthews, 39, Montianez Merriweather, 34, and Dekyra Vernon, 24, were taken into custody earlier this week after the ordeal, which JD Vance waded in on. Matthew and Merriweather were initially charged with aggravated riot and assault over the brawl. New footage has also emerged showing the moments leading up to the attack, with one of the men who police said was a victim using racial slurs. The video, obtained by The Enquirer, shows the unknown individual say: 'Get him! Get that little n*****.' Two black men appeared to try and talk to the man to calm him down before the brawl starts. Matthews' attorney Brandon Fox released the video.
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘Avenue of Death': the Rio motorway where stray bullets, botched raids and resilience collide
When Renato Oliveira boarded a bus down Brazil Avenue one morning last October it should have been just another normal commute. Traveling along Rio's most important motorway, it usually took the 48-year-old meat packer just under an hour to reach his factory – enough time for a nap. 'Don't let me miss my stop,' Oliveira told a friend before nodding off against the window. They were his last words. Unbeknown to passengers on the number 493 bus, up ahead rifle-toting police were storming one of the scores of favelas that line the road, hoping to capture a notorious drug lord. A gun battle broke out, sending motorists scattering for cover behind the concrete central reservation. Oliveira was hit by a stray bullet as he dozed. Soon after, a neighbour broke the news to his family. 'We thought it was a lie,' said the victim's sister-in-law who, like many caught up in the bloodshed blighting Rio, asked not to be named. When Brazil Avenue was built in the 1940s, during the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship, it was conceived as a patriotic statement of the South American country's economic ascent, said Pedro Moraes, the author of a book about the motorway. Eight decades later, the 36-mile highway – which bisects more than 25 neighourhoods as it leads from Rio's western outskirts towards its heart – has become an emblem of something else: the government's inability to control urban violence. 'Nowadays, citizens in Rio can't even take a nap on the bus to work,' a leading newspaper protested after Oliveira's killing, calling Brazil Avenue 'a symbol of the Brazilian state's failure to combat organized crime'. According to the Instituto Fogo Cruzado, a group that tracks gun violence, Brazil Avenue suffered 637 shootouts from 2017 to 2024 – one every five days. The bullets killed 160 people and wounded 383. Last week three police officers were killed on the motorway after losing control of their vehicle during a high-speed chase. 'Brazil Avenue is an avenue that is so profoundly revealing about what our country is … It faithfully represents the name it bears,' said Antônio Carlos Costa, the head of Rio de Paz, an anti-violence NGO. While the thoroughfare's builders envisaged creating a monument to development and industrialization, Costa believed it exposed 'a country of brutal inequality, injustice and social exclusion'. Costa recalled how millions of poverty-stricken north-eastern migrants had flocked to Rio and made their homes along the motorway since the 1950s, building lives in deprived housing estates and favelas that were 'ignored by society and authorities' and are now mostly controlled by armed criminal groups. Millionaires, celebrities and opinion makers used the motorway to reach beach paradises and mansions, oblivious to 'the real Rio de Janeiro' they drove past on the way. All walks of life are exposed to the deadly violence afflicting Brazil Avenue thanks to decades of state neglect. Recently, Costa's son was driving home on the highway when tracer bullets lit up the night sky. 'He told me it looked like fireworks flying across the road,' said the activist, speaking 24 hours after a policeman's body was found in a bullet-riddled vehicle abandoned on the same motorway. The families supported by Costa's group include that of 43-year-old Cátia Sebastiana de Lima. Her husband, an Uber driver called Paulo Roberto de Souza, was also killed during last October's botched police raid in which Oliveira lost his life. Three others were shot but survived. 'He had so many dreams … he was such a great dad,' Lima said, shedding tears as she recalled saying a 5am prayer with her husband the morning he was shot. Six months later, Lima has yet to receive any compensation and was struggling to make ends meet. 'I never ever imagined I'd lose my husband to gun violence … A heart attack, maybe. But it never crossed my mind that it'd be something as tragic as this,' she said. Brazil Avenue's reputation for traffic chaos and gunfights has earned it a series of grim nicknames. Some call it the 'Avenida da Morte' ('Avenue of Death'), others 'Avenida Ziquizira' ('Bad Luck Avenue'). The violence-stricken region around the road is known as the Gaza Strip. Washington Rimas, a social activist raised in one of Brazil Avenue's favelas in the early 80s, admitted that infamy was not entirely undeserved. As a boy, he remembers criminals dumping victims in the undergrowth across the motorway from his home in Amarelinho. 'It was this frightful scrubland. Loads of people would just come from other places and chuck the corpses over there in the bushes,' said Rimas, whose mother was one of the first inhabitants of the community built for construction and factory workers. But Rimas, 49, insisted Brazil Avenue was about more than bloodshed and pushed back against its notoriety. The motorway was also an essential means of transport for workers with jobs in Rio's richer central and southern zones. The road's favelas were places of talent and graft. Rimas, a reformed drug trafficker who abandoned crime over a decade ago, said his new mission was helping local kids with extracurricular activities such as music, IT and dance. 'It was here that we sold poison – and it's here that we're going to produce the antidote,' he said of his quest to improve his corner of Brazil Avenue. Community leader Vanessa Galdino also rejected the negative portrayal of Avenida Brasil and the working-class areas the road connects. 'I'm proud of living here,' said Galdino, 29, a student who runs an ice-cream parlour for Amarelinho's youth. Galdino had no plans to leave despite losing her father to violence when she was 17. 'We are resilient, welcoming people,' she said. Warts and all, Brazil Avenue was home. Among victims of Brazil Avenue's violence, such optimism is harder to find. Sitting at home surrounded by pictures of her dead husband, Lima urged authorities to change their strategy of combating drug gangs with warzone-style raids on the favelas. 'You don't just fight crime with police, shooting and invasions … You need social projects, schools, music, sport, healthcare and education … We need to convince our children that they're Brazil's future,' said Lima, who doubted authorities would listen. As she absorbed her loss, she clung to her Christian faith. 'I like to say that I didn't lose my husband,' Lima said. 'I returned him to God.'
