The disturbingly horrible stabbing murder of Barnard freshman Tessa Majors over a cheap robbery by one to three thugs is an awful story.  The victim was an 18-year-old female, a very young-looking teenager, walking to campus around 7 or 8 P.M., when it would have been dark.

Image credit: Instagram screen shot.

It hits home for me because I was a student at Columbia in the pre-Giuliani early 1990s and recall being told to never go to Morningside Park, where it happened.  I went there six years ago for the first time at my class reunion and recall feeling unsafe in broad daylight even then.  It's a wilderness-y narrow park on a sloping hill with long winding roads going side to side slowly upward, with no obvious direct paths cutting through to the top, no shortcuts.  You're supposed to meander.  The downhill side faces a gritty part of Harlem, including a major street with subway stops.  The uphill leads to the backs of buildings of Columbia, which are facing the university's central squares.  The news reports say there was a university security guard somewhere up there, and the university says the person was at his post and called 911, but he obviously wasn't helpful enough to save her life as she lay bleeding.  It wasn't nothing, but reports are vague on whether he rendered aid or just watched and made his call.  Some reports say she had to stagger up a long stone staircase with stab-in-the-heart knife wounds before she could get the guard's attention.  (It's early, and some reports contradict.)  The New York Times says she was spotted on the street by the guard, who made his call.

It's a shock-the-conscience story that's drawing a lot of attention to the shambles that New York has become under its return to blue-city leftist rule.

Unpopular Mayor Bill de Blasio, who's excused these kinds of crimes in the past, has made the right noises, but it remains to be seen if he's serious.

But the Times seems to be eager to minimize the crime, cast a negative light on the victim, and exculpate the now-socialist city.

Get a load of this lede:

Tessa Majors came to New York City to make some music.

Ms. Majors, an 18-year-old Barnard student whom everyone recognized by her green hair, grew up in Charlottesville, Va., and moved to New York City for college, spending her weekends singing and playing punk rock.

No, pal, she came there to go to school, and not just any school, but a pretty competitive one.  An academically accomplished girl loses her entire life to some vile criminal looking for a free cell phone, and the Times focuses on her green hair and her punk rock interest.  See, she was just a punk, so it wasn't such a bad crime.

Normal people would look at her face and recoil, given that she looked so young and vulnerable, actually.  But the Times wanted to assure us that that wasn't the case.  Get a load of this crap:

It did not surprise Mr. Graham that Ms. Majors was crisscrossing New York, making music and adapting to city life quickly. "She was more worldly than most people 17 or 18 years old coming from here," he said.

Bzzt, wrong again.  "More worldly?"  Sure, it was a quote, but what trash.  Her own family members said she was young and naïve about the big city in other reports.  Here's what a real "worldly," one of the locals, had to say about the sight of college kids crossing through that park at night:

Still, she said, "I would see young people, students, going in here at night. I was like, 'Wow. I would never, ever do that.'"

I didn't feel comfortable in that park six years ago in broad daylight, when things were supposedly safe, and I was older and pretty wary and smart enough to be suspicious.  But when I was her age going to college in San Francisco and walking through San Francisco's bum-strewn streets, I made many mistakes about personal safety, too, and was frequently a robbery target based on my young looks and thin stature.  This girl didn't know, and while she may have been bold, to call her "worldly," given what happened, is an insult, another attempt to minimize the crime.

As the Times yaks about Majors being "worldly," it also yaps about Morningside Heights park being so wonderfully safe, so, see, the stab-murder was an anomaly and not a systematic indictment of the socialist blue-city de Blasio era. Here's this:

The park where Ms. Majors was killed is in a Harlem precinct that has grown safer over the years, but residents have raised concerns about persistent safety issues in the park — even as the neighborhood around it improved, and playgrounds and ball fields replaced patches that were once strewn with crack vials.

Translation: It's safe, but oh, it's not safe, but let us wrap this around again and say again that it's safe, this time, "improved." No mention of the fact that maybe it was safe at some point which coincided with the Rudolph Giuliani era when robberies were busted hard and not tolerated because let's face it, some are going to lead to murders. Or that New York has since gone over to blue-city rule and opposition to robberies is now synonymous with racism. See some bias? Not safe means not safe, pal, and yes, cop reports being ignored by the Times all these months say the robberies in that park have spiked. The stab-murder of young Tess demonstrates what happens during "robberies."

How about this one:

Earlier this year, several people reported that they had been approached from behind in the park and punched by young people.

Ah. "Young people." Must have been those Columbia students hitting each other.  Notice they've dropped the use of the earlier euphemism, "youths." Now it's "young people." And if anyone is apprehended, he'll be called a "teen" or better still, a "child." Gotta watch out for those "young people."

And this:

John McEvoy, 57, said that he, too, had lived in the area his whole life and that he worried about a possible revival of the danger the park posed when he was younger.

A possible revival of danger? The girl is dead. To call danger a 'possible' revival is garbage, if an uncaught stab-murder over a cheap cellphone isn't a sign of some serious danger, what is? Oh, but to the Times, it's just possible danger, it might be our imaginations.

More minimization from a non-expert innocent here:

And Amanda Ong, 21, a senior at the college, said her classmates should not be afraid of Morningside Park. "Nothing like this has ever happened while I've been here," she said. "It seems like an isolated incident."

 Had to make sure to include that quote about "seems like an isolated incident." Seems? Isolated? Nice way to get the narrative out that this was an anomaly.

There was one useful piece of information in the piece from one student who said he'd been advised to not take the A C or E trains because you'd have to cut through that park to get back to campus. Was the university encouraging the kids to take that subway route, instead of the 1 or 9 trains which drop kids off in front of campus? The Times didn't follow up on that one, but it would be a highly relevant piece of information. I also wanted to know if the girl's cell phone was burnt out, which one report had, but that didn't get followed up, either. Was it an Apple? Some of those burn out fast, maybe there's a cell phone problem, too, because she could have made a 911 call herself if she had a working cellphone.

In any case, the Times has a big problem now that the reality of blue-city politics has hit New York in a dramatic turnaround from the Giuliani era — kids are now being murdered. That's why they're doing their best within decency to put the victim down and insist that the city remains safe even with crime now a free for all in New York. Fox News reports that Giuliani's police chief, Bernie Kerik, who went after robberies and all petty crime with a brickbat, says this crime was the result of blue city reversals of those anti-crime policies. The Times isn't going to touch that news or that elephant in the room with a barge pole.