The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Probably Not His First Crime

Posted on | May 17, 2025 | No Comments

Sometime when you have nothing better to do, try a Google search on “vehicular homicide carjacking,” and you’ll be sure to find some genuinely tragic stories of innocent people dying because of criminal activity. Never mind for now why I did such a search and learned of a heinous crime this week in Riverside County, California:

The man who allegedly stole a 79-year-old’s vehicle from a Norco carwash, then dragged him for about a half mile to his death as he was partially in the car, has been charged with first-degree murder.
Ryan Hewitt of Corona made a court appearance on Wednesday for carjacking and first-degree murder charges for the May 12 incident. His arraignment was continued to May 27.
On Monday around 12:30 p.m., a witness called the sheriff’s department saying they saw a man get in the driver’s seat of a vehicle and drive away, with the vehicle’s owner still partially in the rear seat.
Investigators say the victim was at a carwash near the Arco gas station on Hidden Valley Parkway, vacuuming his car, when the suspect jumped into the driver’s seat and took off.
Riverside County Sheriff’s Department officials said the victim was ejected from the car after being dragged for about a half mile. Corona police found the man after he fell from the car. He was taken to a hospital but died from his injuries.
Deputies located the stolen car and took the suspect into custody.
“During the investigation, the victim’s SUV was located unoccupied near the intersection of Polk Street and Magnolia Avenue in the city of Riverside,” said a statement from deputies.
“Investigators began working closely with members of the Riverside Police Department and ultimately detained a male near the intersection of Magnolia Avenue and Tyler Street.”
The victim has been identified as Corona resident James Norman. He was better known to friends and family as Jim, a beloved father, grandfather and Army veteran.

Because it’s California — and not, say, Florida — we don’t have any information about Ryan Hewitt’s prior criminal history, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that he’s got the proverbial record as long as your arm. It is seldom the case that a criminal begins his career with murder, after all. More specifically, however, Hewitt was also charged with “illegal possession of a firearm,” which we may interpret as meaning that he is a convicted felon and thus prohibited from firearm possession.

If you know anything about criminal behavior, you must know this: Before a suspect is charged with murder, he’s probably already committed a lot of other crimes, including crimes for which he was never arrested. In fact, there are many thousands of murderers out walking the streets of America, having gotten away with it. Consider that in Chicago, there were 617 homicides in 2023, and the police department reported that Chicago detectives “cleared 319 homicides this year, bringing the homicide clearance rate to 51.70% — the highest since 2019.” Simple arithmetic tells you that 298 homicides went unsolved in 2023 — the killers are still out there. Further investigation reveals that Chicago reported 779 homicides in 2020, 805 in 2021, 715 in 2022 and 581 in 2024, meaning that during this five-year period there were a total of 3,497 homicides in Chicago. The “clearance rate” for Chicago homicides was never more than 52% in any year during this period, so that means roughly 1,700 murderers in Chicago who didn’t get caught since 2019.

Guess what? The homicide clearance rate isn’t much better (and in some cases is worse) in other major U.S. cities. How many killers never got arrested in Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans, Memphis, Atlanta, etc.? Some graduate student could probably analyze the data and come up with an estimate of the total number of unprosecuted murderers running loose in the country, but my point is that it is not a small number. And if you are shocked that the clearance rate for homicide cases is barely 50% in many cities, wait until you find out about non-fatal shootings. That is to say, if you get shot and don’t die, what are the chances that the person who tried to kill you gets arrested? In Chicago, “more than 19,000 people [were] wounded in shootings . . . since 2018. The Chicago Police Department has made arrests in 1,200 of those cases,” i.e., 94% of non-fatal shootings went unsolved. Whether you classify non-fatal shootings as aggravated assault or attempted murder, these are very serious crimes, and the perpetrators of such crimes are very dangerous people. Yet more than 18,000 would-be killers are roaming the streets of Chicago, probably still carrying firearms, ready and willing to shoot somebody else.

About 700 words ago, I said, “Never mind for now why” I did that search for “vehicular homicide carjacking,” but the time has come for me to introduce you to a Cornell University professor, Peter Enns.

Professor Enns and his book, ‘Incarceration Nation’

The professor was quite popular after the 2016 publication of his book, the thesis of which is about “how shifting public opinion on issues of crime and punishment led to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. . . . Public opinion matters immensely in the U.S. criminal justice system” (emphasis added). In other words, according to Professor Enns, the reason there are so many criminals behind bars is not because they have committed crimes, but rather that Americans are guilty of what he calls a more “punitive” opinion about criminal justice. It’s as if the actual facts of crime are irrelevant to incarceration (“mass” or otherwise).

Well, you can Google “recidivism rate,” too:

A 2019 study found that within five years of release, 70% of prisoners reoffended. . . .
Recidivism statistics in the U.S. are bleak. A 2021 Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that 66% of people released from prison in 24 different states in 2008 were re-arrested within three years. At the decade mark, 82% had been re-arrested.

Whatever public opinion on the matter may be, the reality is that a very large percentage of serious crime is committed by a comparatively small number of habitual criminals. If you identify, arrest and convict such repeat offenders, and put them behind bars, there is a tremendous benefit to public safety. Yet, as is demonstrated by the Chicago homicide statistics, about half of all murderers get away with their crimes in some urban jurisdictions, and more than 90% of non-fatal shootings go unsolved, with the result that many thousands of dangerous criminals are still out on the streets, endangering public safety. The urban crime menace is not a matter of public opinion, it’s a deadly reality. Just this week (“‘He’s No Stranger to Us’: The Problem of Our ‘Revolving-Door’ Justice System”) I examined a perfect example of the recidivism problem, and I have little doubt that this fatal carjacking case in California will prove to be another such example. Crime is about behavioral patterns.

Now let’s hear more from Professor Enns:

“I developed a measure of punitiveness over time and discovered that politicians were reacting to public opinion instead of the other way around,” said Enns, associate professor of government. Public opinion, not politicians, was driving changes in the criminal justice system. . . .
As the crime rate increased between 1960 and 1990, the media offered heavy coverage of criminal activity. “But it’s well known that crime is not accurately reported,” says Enns. “There’s an overemphasis on violent crimes and crimes committed by minorities, which gives people a skewed view.”
However, Enns’s research offers the first evidence that despite this skew, changes in media coverage of crime closely match changes in the actual crime rate. Enns credits the media’s influence for the peak of public punitiveness in the 1990s, resulting in laws like three-strikes-you’re-out and mandatory sentencing.
High incarceration rates have continued despite a declining crime rate since the 1990s. Nevertheless, Enns shows the crime rate does influence the incarceration rate. Previous research, he says, has failed to uncover the causes of mass incarceration by not analyzing changes in the incarceration rate.
Another point Enns makes is the benefit of incarceration in crime reduction decreases as incarceration increases. The reason is simple: the worst criminals are locked up first. As a result, spending more money to lock more people up turns out not to be as effective at reducing crime as spending that same amount of money on more police.

So he says, although (a) the professor’s ability to make cause-and-effect analysis seems questionable, (b) he was still in college during the 1990s, and (c) he’s spent the past 18 years teaching at an Ivy League university and I’m not sure a faculty gig in Ithaca, New York, is the best place to formulate an accurate view about crime in America. The average cop in Chicago certainly knows more on the subject than does Professor Enns. If you want a good laugh, check out this tweet:

Gosh, I wonder why the U.S. incarceration rate is not the same as in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland? It’s so mysterious. However, if you took a police officer from Finland or Denmark, and transferred them to the West Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago, probably within six weeks, they’d be like Kurtz in the Congo: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

Let’s end this 1,500-word post where it started, with the results of a Google search about fatal carjackings:

  • JACKSONVILLE, Florida: Rodney Wesley, 20, has been charged with grand theft auto, carjacking, theft, leaving the scene of a crash involving death, vehicular homicide, and resisting without violence as the result of a bizarre crime spree in February. He is accused of causing a multi-vehicle pileup on Interstate 295that killed a 66-year-old man.
  • SEATTLE, Washington: Jahmed Kamal Haynes, 48, faces charges of first-degree murder and first-degree animal cruelty after police say he killed 80-year-old Ruth Dalton by getting into her passenger seat, pushing her out of her car, and running her over last August, and also stabbing her dog. “Haynes’ criminal record includes six felony convictions dating back to 1983, including vehicular homicide and robbery in 1999.”
  • PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, Maryland: Deandre Boyd, 25, and two 16-year-old juveniles were charged with murder and carjacking in connection with an August crime spree that killed 38-year-old Fernando Alvarenga Cuellar, who was shot to death during an attempted robbery.
  • COLUMBUS, Ohio: Gerald Dowling Jr., 19, and two 16-year-olds were charged last July with murdering a 29-year-old single mother, Alexa Stakely. Police said the teens stole Stakey’s SUV with her 6-year-old son asleep inside, and that they ran her over with her own vehicle while she was trying to rescue the child.
  • LOUDOUN COUNTY, Virginia: Jose Aguilar-Martinez, 21, is charged with killing 54-year-old Melody Waldecker last July, when he carjacked her and ran over her with her own vehicle at a 7-Eleven. Aguilar-Martinez is an illegal alien from El Salvador.

These are mere anecdotes — random occurrences plucked from the headlines found by a Google search — and I cannot say that any particular conclusion is proven by such methods. My experience and knowledge, however, lead me to surmise that in none of these deadly cases were the suspects committing their first crime. Maybe the problem is we don’t have enough “mass incarceration,” or else all these carjacking victims wouldn’t be dead. But I’m not an Ivy League professor, so nobody’s paying me to write a book about it.



 

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Category: Crime

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