No end to the violence

So much for New Year’s resolutions.
On today’s editorial page, we pleaded for less violence in 2008.
We couldn’t even get the words into print – or posted on the Web site – before those intent on doing otherwise left their deadly marks.
The violence started on New Year’s Eve, and claimed the life of a Delaware County man even if the incident itself did not occur here.
Police in New Castle County, Del., believe Ira Graham, 50, of Trainer, was the victim of a shooting in Claymont.
Police reports indicate Graham was shot once in the upper body as he sat in a BMW on Peachtree Road near Cedar Tree Road. Graham was sitting with a friend in the car when they were approached by a person who chatted with them before getting into the car.
Graham, a passenger, was shot. The man is then believed to have fled on foot.
Graham was transported to the hospital, where he died.
His death put a final exclamation point on a violent 2007. Graham’s death brought New Castle County’s homicide total to 11 for the year. Here in Delaware County, 43 people were murder victims.
The singing of “Auld Lang Syne” did not exactly quell the violence.
In Philadelphia, where 392 people were killed in 2007 (incredibly that’s actually down from the year before), four people were shot in a confrontation with police in the early hours of the new year. One of the victims was a 9-year-old boy. It’s the same old story. Police believe New Year’s revelers were shooting weapons into the air.
The city notched its first homicide of 2008 just hours into the new year when a man was beaten and stabbed repeatedly during a street argument around 3 a.m.
Across the river in Camden, they recorded their first homicide in 2008 just nine hours into the new year.
So far in Delaware County, we have yet to record a murder. I am left to wonder how long that will last.
Maybe we should run a contest. I do not mean to make light of a serious issue. But I am just about out of ideas on how to stop our decline into a more and more violent society.
My wish is that we would not have to run a single story on someone being murdered on the streets of Delaware County in 2008. Reality tells me it likely won’t take that long.
Today we’ll be compiling the story of a county man slain just over the border in Delaware.
Just how long will it take before blood once again is spilled on our own streets?

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