FOXnews Discusses Armanious Murders

No article link today, since this is a "live blog" entry--I caught this on the Fox News Channel. Of course, you have to give Fox News credit for talking about the murders of Hossam Armanious on the air at all--no other network will touch the story with a proverbial seven-cubit pole. Nor is this the first time Fox News talked about it. The trouble is that their main analyist on the case still wants to support the robbery theory.

To recap: Hossam Armanious, his wife, and two teen-aged daughters were found bound, gagged, and their throats slit or punctured in their home. Three thousand dollars' worth of jewelry was found inside the house--the first time any major media outlet has admitted that. (Even Fox News at first said that all the jewelry in the house had been cleaned out, something they no longer say.) And yet we still hear that the house had been tossed and the victims' pockets turned out. If you've followed this blog, you know that I got on this story when it first broke, and then again, and again, again, again, again, and again.

The analyst said one thing that doesn't make sense at all. He suggested that the reason why $3000 worth of jewels remained in the house is that the perps couldn't grab it all, because they didn't have time--a new angle, which no one else has mentioned. Now that would make sense only if Hossam and his family lived high. They didn't. Their lifestyle was very modest--Hossam's wife worked at a post-office station, for cryin' out loud! And no one has come forward to suggest that she was featherbedding. (I've heard tales of featherbedding Post Office employees, but this would have exceeded even the most cynical limits. But, as I said--not a peep.)

So we are left to believe that a modest-living family had enough jewelry lying around to attract a gang of brutal thieves. And the torture marks on the bodies? Torturing them to give up the location of the safe, the hidden stashes, and whatnot.

Well, let me blow that one right out of the water right now. A family with that much jewelry to their name doesn't keep it in the house. They let the bank keep it. The bank came up with this marvelous invention, decades ago, called "safe deposit boxes." And these days, who keeps cash in the house, in this credit-card world? Who even needs to buy anything with cash? And if they do, they withdraw money at the street-corner ATM before they show up at the hardware store.

Sorry, Jersey City's finest. I'm not buying the robbery theory. Nor am I buying the theory that the robbers wanted to make it look like a Muslim-style assassination. More likely, Muslim assassins wanted to make it look like a robbery. And the spectacle of the Jersey City Police Department going along with the scam makes me sick. This is the same city where a bunch of wackos were dancing on the rooftops of their apartment building when the World Trade Center fell down--and also the city that saw a number of arsons that same year.