From: "E.J. Totty", [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Check this out.
from AmericanPartisan.com
<http://www.americanpartisan.com/cols/henry.htm>
Monday, May 29, 2000
What One Woman Really Needed
by Lawrence Henry
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On the very weekend that "a million" so-called "moms" supposedly
"marched" for what was sound-bited as "common-sense gun laws,"
a young woman from my New Jersey hometown was killed by a
sadistic and brutal man. He shot her in the back of the head with a
stolen pistol, then killed himself with the same gun.
The paper I write for, the Westfield Leader, ran a front-page photo -
incongruous in our peaceful town - of a fully-armed and helmeted
SWAT team marching up Central Avenue, not half a mile from my
house. The police arrived too late to prevent the crime.
The young woman, Sohayla Massachi, 23, had apparently gotten
to the know the man, Christopher Honrath, 24, via the Internet about
a year ago. Honrath weighed 300 pounds and got his kicks punching
brick walls and other people. A headline in a followup story in the
Newark Star-Ledger described him as "a scary young man." He had
been arrested six years earlier for stalking a 15-year-old girl.
That girl's family had actually been forced to move the
15-year-old out of the state to get her away from Honrath.
Massachi apparently realized her mistake early, and tried to drop
Honrath. But Honrath wouldn't let go.
The events of the day Massachi died present an object lesson in the
limits of law enforcement.
Item one: Massachi had obtained a temporary restraining order
against Honrath, an order he reportedly violated again and again.
The day Massachi died, police told the Star-Ledger, the two were due
in court for a hearing on Massachi's petition to make that order final.
Item two: Honrath showed up at the campus of Seton Hall University in
South Orange, lassoed Massachi around the throat with a necktie, and
dragged her, shrieking, into his car. He drove away with the passenger
door swinging open and Massachi's legs trailing outside. A witness to
the abduction screamed at Honrath to stop, while another witness
begged a campus security guard to call the police. The security guard, s
ince fired, essentially said, "Not my job," and did nothing but tell the
witnesses to go to the South Orange police station.
The witnesses called the police station - giving a clear, concise,
frightened account of the abduction, including the license plate number
of Honrath's car. A police officer came to one of the witness's homes and
took a report.
Item three: My Westfield Leader colleague Paul J. Peyton, writing a
followup story, reported that a third witness jumped in a car and followed
the Honrath vehicle down South Orange Avenue and onto the Garden State
Parkway. That driver called 911 on the way.
"That's when it got ugly," said Westfield Police Lt. Frank Brunelle, quoted
in Paul's story. Brunelle said the 911 operator "literally blew the woman
off" who made the call.
At his Westfield apartment, Honrath parked, then dragged Massachi, who
was still screaming, up the back stairs and inside. Honrath's roommate
heard the violence from another part of the two-family house and called the
Westfield police. They sent their SWAT team.
Item four: The SWAT team knocked on Honrath's apartment door just in
time to hear the gunshots.
At the Leader, I got the assignment of interviewing Sohayla Massachi's
former teachers and friends from Westfield High School, from where she
had graduated in 1994, to find out what kind of person she was. She was a
very nice person indeed. As one of her teachers told me, when he heard the
news, his first reaction was, "Aw, Jeez, no, it just couldn't happen."
But it did.
It happened in spite of a restraining order, in spite of Massachi's going
to college at a campus with security guards, in spite of repeated reports
to police of Honrath's threats to Massachi (in the months before the crime)
and of his violent acts (on the day of the murder itself), in spite of a
prompt response by a SWAT team. It happened while, in Washington, a
hundred thousand deluded demonstrators claimed to want to protect
children with mandatory trigger locks and gun registration laws. It happened
because all the gun laws in the world wouldn't have kept a stolen
revolver out of the hands of a borderline psychotic. Nor would - or could, or
did - any amount of law have protected the young woman that psycho killed.
Sohayla Massachi, and the witnesses to her abduction, tried everything
to foil Christopher Honrath - except the one thing that could have worked.
Sohayla Massachi needed a gun.
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