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| Mayor de Blasio being sworn into office by Former President Clinton |
I’m not
really a fan of his left wing politics. But newly installed mayor of New York
City, Bill de Blasio is on the right side of this issue. He too sees the New
York Post’s coverage of the Stark murder as an outrage and has condemned it
right along with the rest of the civilized world. He has rightly separated his
murder from his questionable business practices. Something the New York Post saw fit to
exploit. His prayers are with the family as ours should all be. What follows is
a JTA article about this.
(JTA) — New York City’s new mayor, Bill de
Blasio, said finding the killer of haredi Orthodox Brooklyn landlord Menachem
Stark is a priority and condemned the New York Post’s coverage of the incident.
De Blasio, who has been roundly criticized for his silence in the case, ripped the newspaper for its coverage on the front page of its Jan. 4 edition that included a headline blaring “Who Didn’t Want Him Dead?” next to a photo of Stark, 39, sporting a large shtreimel and graying side curls.
“It was
unfair. It was hurtful. And there is really no place for that kind of thing in
New York City,” de Blasio told the WMCA’s Orthodox-interest “Community Matters”
radio program. “I know a lot of people are outraged, and I share their
outrage.”
The mayor,
who was sworn in at the start of the year, vowed to find Stark’s killer or
killers.
“It’s a
tragedy what happened to Mr. Stark. And my heart goes out for the family and
they are in my thoughts and prayers,” de Blasio said. “And I know that for
many, many people in the Jewish community this has been a very painful moment
and I want to say: First of all, we are going to get to the bottom of it. We
will find who did this to him and who robbed children of a father and a wife of
a husband.”
Meanwhile,
police reportedly found a new clue in the case, with WABC-TV reporting over the
weekend that a cellphone being used as a tracking device was found taped under
Stark’s car. Police are trying to identify the phone’s owner.
Stark’s body
was found Jan. 3 on suburban Long Island some 16 miles away from his office in
the heavily Satmar section of Williamsburg, from where he was kidnapped the
previous evening. He reportedly was suffocated before his body was placed in a
dumpster outside a Great Neck gas station and burned, according to police.
Video
footage taken from his office reportedly showed Stark being taken into a van
after a struggle outside his office. The identity of his abductors is not
known.
