Reddit reviews Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America

I never heard about this one till I read Paved With Good Intentions, and then went searching to find out more about this. Real fucking winner here.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2001/jan/29/20010129-020918-6730r/

>Greg Murphy, at 18, had gained a reputation as a strong-arm neighborhood drug dealer.
He packed a gun and was driven around in a late-model Mercedes-Benz, according to his four-inch-thick criminal file in the Alexandria court clerk's office, and interviews with those who knew him.
By 1992, he pleaded guilty to consensual sodomy in Arlington after prosecutors there agreed to drop a rape and cocaine possession charge against him. Murphy received a suspended three-year sentence.

>Murphy hasn't cooperated with attorneys appointed to represent him. He even punched and knocked out one of them, Jonathan Shapiro, during a hearing in October, shortly after Judge Swersky denied Murphy's request to meet with him privately.

>On Sept. 18, 1993, a simple glance from a stranger around 4 p.m. at a gas station caused Murphy to attack the man, Leonard Riddle, with a ball-peen hammer he had been carrying around in his pocket that day.
He struck Mr. Riddle again and again, prompting one witness to yell, "My God, he's going to kill him."

>An unsupervised Murphy didn't stay out of trouble long. A week later, on April 17, he was arrested after Fairfax County police found 0.8 grams of cocaine and 2.6 grams of marijuana stashed in a bag in his Homewood Suites Hotel room, a Baileys Crossroads hotel where he was staying for a couple of nights.
The room began to belch smoke when a lit cigarette he laid on the bed just before he went off to take a shower set his mattress on fire. Fire sprinklers went off and soon firefighters arrived.
Murphy, oblivious to the sprinklers raining down around him, refused to leave. He was arrested, jailed and released on bail that same day.

>Two days before Kevin's slaying, on April 17, angry racial notes were found in Murphy's nearby hotel room, revealing that somebody most likely a white child was going to die soon.
"Kill them raceess whiate kidd's anyway," read one note scrawled on the back of a Virginia Department of Corrections memo, according to news reports.

>On April 19, Murphy put a steak knife in his pocket and began to walk the streets of his neighborhood, looking to vent his anger, investigators believe.
Prosecutors say no one may ever know what led Murphy to grab Kevin from behind, stabbing him 18 times and then slashing his throat.

EDIT: Re-ordered the quote for better chronology in this condensed format.

You should read "paved with good intentions" for a good scholarly piece on race.