By Jarrett Stepman | Commentary, The Daily Signal
“I will fight until my last breath for my daughter. You need to fight for the rest of our children, the rest of the innocents, and stop protecting the people that keep taking them from us, please.”
Those were the words of Stephen Federico, the father of a 22-year-old woman who was allegedly killed by a man who had faced 40 criminal charges in the years before her murder. He gave his impassioned testimony about the need for keeping more criminals behind bars at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Monday.
Federico’s heartbreaking testimony vividly highlighted one of the clearest reasons America’s Democrat-run cities face a serious crime problem: repeat offenders end up back out on the streets after being given countless chances by authorities.
It’s hard to listen to Federico speak about his daughter’s slaying and not be enraged.
“Bang. Dead. Gone. Why? Because Alexander Devante Dickey—who was arrested 39 times, 25 felonies—was on the street.”
“My daughter was forced on her knees with her hands over her head, begging for her life, begging for her hero—her father, me—that couldn’t be there. She was 5-foot-3, she weighed 115 pounds. My daughter wanted to be a teacher. She finally figured it out two weeks before she was executed,” Federico said. “And you will not forget her. I promise you: You will be sick and tired of my face and my voice until this gets fixed. I will fight until my last breath for my daughter.”
Federico and a handful of other witnesses had been called in to testify after the brutal killing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte, North Carolina, train captured national headlines in September.
Zarutska was allegedly stabbed to death by Decarlos Brown Jr., a man with a long rap sheet of serious crimes and a history of mental illness. He should have never been on the street, as even his mother insisted.
Incidents like what happened to Zarutska and Federico’s daughter aren’t just tragedies. They are severe and intolerable abridgements of justice. Their killers should never have been walking free. While they received nearly endless chances to prove that they could be anything less than a danger to themselves and the public, their victims won’t get another chance at anything.
As I wrote in the wake of the Charlotte killing, there needs to be a national reckoning on crime, much like there was in the 1990s. The “Defund the Police” movement that emerged in 2020 and quickly burned itself out after crime exploded had nearly everything wrong. America didn’t need to defund the police. It didn’t need to “abolish prison” as some of the loonier activists demanded.
Instead, we needed to double down on targeted policing and extended prison sentences for repeat offenders. Those with mental illnesses must be institutionalized.
A disproportionate number of crimes in the U.S. are committed by the exact same people.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE DAILY SIGNAL
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