Three years ago, New York’s Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that rising crime in major cities isn’t really crime because the thieves are really just poor moms and dads stealing food for their little ones.
Apparently, an estimable personage called “Meatball” — real name, Dayjia Blackwell — didn’t get the memo.
On Tuesday, Philadelphia cops arrested Meatball on six felonies because she joined the plundering looters who rampaged through the city’s stores. Among the locations the looters hit to steal diapers, baby food, and healthy salads were iPhone, liquor, and expensive fitness apparel stores.
Meatball enthusiastically encouraged the looting as she recorded it. Now she’s distressed, and claims she’s innocent, despite the video depicting her crimes.
Meatball the Looter
As is customary, the looting, organized on social media, began in connection with yet another police shooting of yet another thug, the city’s Inquirer reported.
“WHAT TIME WE GOING “SHOPPING”???” an enthusiastic looting advocate wrote.
“We looting or not??!!” another wanted to know.
The looters left stores across the city destroyed:
Dozens of people — including what police described as a caravan of “criminal opportunists” — broke into stores along popular shopping corridors from Center City to the Northeast to West Philadelphia, authorities said. They broke through metal door protectors and spliced locks with bolt cutters, then looted the stores and fled with electronics, shoes, clothes, liquor, pharmaceuticals, and other goods.…
Shoe and clothing racks at JD Sports in the Roosevelt Mall were mostly bare, and a sign on the door read “closed until further notice.” Fine Wine & Good Spirits announced that all of its stores would close Wednesday after 18 locations were broken into.
Meatball’s role, police allege, was a meaty one.
“Tell the police they’re either gonna lock me up tonight, or it’s gonna get lit, it’s gonna be a movie,” she said in an Instagram post.
“After a peaceful downtown protest disbanded about 7:30 p.m., Blackwell, who also has 466,000 followers and 13.4 million views on TikTok, was already in Center City surrounded by a group of other young people that seemed to grow by the minute,” the Inquirer reported:
“What store we going at first, y’all?” she said to the camera.
Someone replied: “Apple Store.”
“Got one, got one, got one!” the “influencer” shouted. “Free iPhones, free iPhones, free iPhones!”
Video also showed her in a car when police arrested her. “Yo what yaw doing, we ain’t got nothing to do with this,” she lied.
Thus did Meatball wind up in jail, and crying in her mugshot.
The charges:
- Burglary
- Criminal trespass
- Conspiracy
- Criminal mischief
- Riot with the intent to commit a felony
- Criminal use of a communication facility
- Receiving stolen property
- Disorderly conduct
The last two are misdemeanors.
Released on $25,000 bail, Meatball said she really isn’t the criminal the video shows her to be. “I’m traumatized, I would never go back in my life,” she complained in yet another video:
They’re trying to make [me] somebody I wasn’t. They really did me dirty because of who I was. That was corny, that was corny.
Why it’s “corny” is a mystery.
AOC’s Excuse
Ocasio-Cortez, also known as Occasional-Cortex, says criminals have no choice because they need food, rather like the protagonist in Les Miserables, Jean Valjean.
During a virtual town hall in July 2020, the former mixologist addressed rising crime in New York.
“Do we think this has to do with the fact that there’s record unemployment in the United States right now?” she asked:
The fact that people are at a level of economic desperation that we have not seen since the Great Recession?
Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren’t paying their rent, and are scared to pay their rent, and so they go out, and they need to feed their child, and they don’t have money, so you maybe have to … they’re put in a position where they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry that night.
She also blamed the lack of unemployment benefits and a delay in receiving the “stimulus“ checks American received during the China Virus Hoax.
Ocasio-Cortez’s explanation for the looting is also a mystery.
