Friday, August 13, 2010

Suspect Arrested in Flint Serial Killings

Way behind the curve on this, but an arrest has been made in the so-called "Flint Serial Killer" case. Maria Glod and Caitlin Gibson of The Washington Post report:
Elias Abuelazam, 33, married twice and tried to settle down in the region, first in Fairfax County and then in Leesburg. Both marriages ended in divorce, and after the last one in 2007, Abuelazam's life became more nomadic. He bounced between Loudoun County, Michigan, Florida and Israel, the friends and court records say.

Over the past 11 weeks, Abuelazam began randomly stabbing and attacking men -- most of them black -- in Michigan, Virginia and Ohio, police say.


6 comments:

  1. I am relieved that the suspect had few ties to the Flint Area or Michigan. He apparently has an Uncle living in the area and worked about a month at the grocery store north of Flint.

    I for one am tired of the media trying to blame everything bad that happens on the so-called "Michigan Militia" and similar looking suspects and the "Tea Party".

    I am angry that the investigators and perhaps even some surviving victims were cooperating with investigators and going along with a description and drawing of the perpetrator which was misleading at best and may have led to more stabbing and deaths. The crowd outside the Kingway Market the other day were obviously upset by the erroneous information also.

    The sweetness-light blog has a lively discussion of how the AP was also involved in the deception and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to even the half truth that the suspect was an Arabic Palestinian "Catholic" or "Christian" and from Israel.

    What has gone wrong with the media that they cannot tell the truth about terrorism? A logical explanation is this was a racially motivated terrorist act intended to be misreported so as to influence the November elections.

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  2. It seems that a majority of the "nut-jobs" who make national news have ties to Michigan. I'm not sure why but that seems to be the case.

    The description both oral and pictorial portrayed what looked to me to be a red-neck white guy with a thin face and a dog-bone piercing in his left ear.

    As it turns out he was Arab with a round face and one report mentioned no evidence of a piercing, as in no noticeable hole in the ear.

    I heard the recording of the 911 tape in Toledo and the victim clearly identified his assailant as an Arab dude.

    This was never made public to my knowledge.

    The crowd outside the party store was angry and I really don't blame them. This guy drove the green and gold blazer to work everyday...there are not many of those vehicles left on the road these days....come on you couldn't look at any news on tv, computer, or print without seeing the description of that vehicle.

    My real issue is with the finances of this guy. How did he travel all around the country, have a vehicle, live in a nice home, post bond, pay to get his vehicle out of impound by working menial jobs. I would like to see the authorities follow the money trail.

    Terrorism has many faces. In this case he was able to terrorize three different communities while adding to the racial tension with the help of the media and authorities in promoting that the suspect was white. Even when he was captured and identified they focused in on Israeli and not Arabic.

    The word on the street is that the authorities knew he was Arabic and was afraid of making that known.

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  3. Gees...sorry to get so wound up on this one....

    Shortly after the capture of the stabber someone from the Arab League of Flint, a female, came forward publicly denouncing his actions and distancing any ties to the Arabic community. That was fine and I don't blame them for being proactive.

    The part I do take exception to is that the spokesperson kept referring to him as Arab-American.

    Everything I have read and heard was that he posessed a "green card" which Prosecuter Leyton said was as "close" to citizenship one can get without being an actual citizen.

    So, why did the spokesperson repeatedly refer to him as Arab-American....when in fact he is Arab-Israeli.....he is not an American, so why refer to him as such when he is here on a green card. Just because he is in this country legally does not make him an American.

    These statements should be as offensive to the Arab-Americans as it is to me a Flintoid-American.

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  4. The first I had heard of him possibly being Middle Eastern is after the Toledo stabbing, and at that point I thought it seemed odd to hear. I think the sketch isn't that far off; put a hat and a goatee on him and it's pretty close. He isn't that tan either, and honestly, try to identify the minor differences in race while being stabbed in the middle of the night. I doubt it was that easy for the victims. I think any thoughts of a conspiracy are far fetched and just plain ridiculous.

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  5. Not sure how much this matters, but I profiled a police sketch artist once. I asked him about how off many of the sketches end up being in the end. He said part of that is a result of how profoundly unreliable eyewitness accounts of almost anything are, even though they carry enormous weight in court. The other reason, according to him, is that one of the goals of the sketch is not to be so precise that it actually excludes potential suspects. Knowing eyewitness accounts are often off a little or a lot, this guy purposely generalized, shooting more for a ballpark likeness.

    I'm not sure I explained that very clearly. Does that make any sense? And this was just one guy in the Silicon Valley area in about 1992.

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  6. Did no one see the "suspect" without the hat? The face in the drawing was way too thin, not just a little.

    I had seen a post somewhere about the Toledo stabbing victim identifying the suspect as Middle Eastern, but they were ready to dismiss it as unrelated to the Flint and Leesburg incidents.

    The drawing was Chief Moose's truck driving Bubba all over again.

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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.