Book Review:

NO SAFE PLACES 
Death at the Hands of Illegal Aliens
by Dave Gibson
The Social Contract Press, 2019
152 pp., $11.95

You know those tearjerker movies that you’ve seen five, ten, or even twenty times so they shouldn’t faze you anymore? And yet, already while the opening credits are rolling to that old familiar theme music, it starts. Much earlier than it did the first time, because you’re already anticipating the heartbreak.

That’s how this book is.

As “Angel Mom” Sabine Durden, the mother of the late Dominic Durden, writes in her foreword: “This book will wake you up and make you cry your eyes out, it will make you angry, very angry, it will break your heart.”

This shouldn’t move me as much as it did, from Mrs. Durden’s foreword on. After all, I’m a grizzled, old crime reporter who saw his first corpse from a murder on July 3, 1975. The cop who was guarding the corpse covered it with his duty jacket.

I’ve kissed cold foreheads goodbye from loved ones who weren’t even listed as having been murdered (lot of that going around), and seen autopsy photos of mutilated and burned murder victims. And yet, Dave Gibson’s book moved me.

He covers the cases of 50 Americans killed by illegal aliens; babies, kids, old folks; civilians, and lawmen alike. Many of the victims were killed by illegal alien drunk drivers, who slaughter thousands of Americans per year. Some of the victims, like Grant Ronnebeck, 21, were shot to death by illegal alien gang-bangers. One, 18-year-old Joshua Wilkerson, was bludgeoned unconscious and burned alive by an illegal alien he’d done a favor for. Others were raped and murdered.

Few of these cases were covered by the national media, at least not at the time of the killing. The Los Angeles murder of Jamiel Shaw Jr., 17, in 2008 was an exception. The August 2018 Iowa murder of college student Mollie Tibbets, 20, got national coverage, but only because it was initially a missing persons case. The media didn’t know that Tibbetts was dead, much less that her killer, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, was an illegal alien from Mexico. Otherwise, they would have used their standard operating procedure of covering up the crime nationally, and quarantining Tibbetts’ murder as a local story.

However, the quarantine is not limited to the national media. For as Gibson reports, the local media have their own sort of quarantine, which involves refusing to identify the suspect’s citizenship status, and dishonestly identifying him as a local American, e.g., “Raleigh man.”

Prior to then-candidate Donald Trump, only a few national politicians had shown any concern for the victims of illegal aliens: Tom Tancredo, Jeff Sessions, Duncan Hunter, father and son.

I knew a number of these cases, because I’d been to conferences where I saw and heard and met the grieving family members (including Sabine Durden), or because colleagues like Brenda Walker, or D.A. King had written on them for VDARE. But most were new to me, as they will be to most readers who are not part of the world of immigration journalism and scholarship.

Dave Gibson covers victims from ages one minute to 93 years old.

Dimitri Smith, one minute old. On June 10, 2012, Ramon A. Hernandez crashed his vehicle into the car driven by Zach Smith. Smith’s wife, Aileen, was seven months pregnant with their first child. Doctors immediately undertook an emergency caesarean delivery. The baby, whom the Smiths named Dimitri, died after one minute in this world.

It was Hernandez’ fifth DUI, and he was driving in spite of a revoked license, due to unpaid traffic tickets.

Hernandez was convicted of “vehicular homicide and causing great bodily injury to a pregnant woman, and sentenced to nine years in prison,” but the conviction was thrown out by an appeals court.

Hernandez had confessed to the crime to a police officer. However, the presiding judge ruled the confession inadmissible as “hearsay,” at the beginning of the trial, but the officer testified to it anyway. (Remember when confessions got you convicted?)

Marten Kudlis, 3. Marten was killed on September 4, 2008, in Aurora, Colorado, by illegal alien Francis Hernandez, from Guatemala. Hernandez blew through an intersection and slammed into a pickup truck, which he pushed into an ice cream shop’s window. Little Marten had been sitting in front of the window outside, waiting for an ice cream cone.

Francis Hernandez also killed Patricia Guntharp (a mother of three), 49, and Debra Serecky (a mother of six), 51, who were in the pickup truck he rammed.

Hernandez, who had no less than 12 aliases and two dates of birth, had been arrested 19 times since 2003…. by nine different police departments.

Emilee Olson, 9; Hunter Javens, 9; Jesse Javens, 13; and Reed Stevens, 12. On February 19, 2008, Guatemalan illegal alien, Olga Marina Franco Del Cid (a.k.a. Alianiss Nunez Morales), blew through a stop sign in Cottonwood, Minnesota, and slammed into the side of a school bus, slaughtering the above-named four children, and wounding four others. The killer asserted that all appearances to the contrary, she wasn’t the real driver, her boyfriend, who was nowhere to be seen, was. The mass killer (Del Cid/Morales) had previously been arrested for operating a vehicle without a license, and never even got a license in her native Guatemala. She did almost nine years in prison. Present whereabouts unknown.

Millard County Utah Sheriff’s Deputy Josie Fox, 37. On January 5, 2010, deputy Fox pulled over Roberto Miramontes Roman on the highway. Roman shot her dead.

Roman, who was the same age as Deputy Fox, was a career criminal who had repeatedly been convicted of felonies in this country, including returning illegally after having been deported, and of drug trafficking. In 2017, he was sentenced to life in prison, plus 80 years.

Deputy Fox was survived by her husband and two children.

Louise Sollowin, 93. On July 21, 2013, Sergio Martinez-Perez, 19, raped Mrs. Sollowin, and beat her to death. There was blood everywhere — on the “walls, floor, ceiling, and bed.” The killer broke the bones in his victim’s face, and was found drunk, naked, and passed out on her body. He was angry at women, and took his rage out on an old lady.

Perez got life.

As I heard a lawman once say during a speech a few years ago, “every state is a border state” because of the illegal alien invasion.

As maddening as these crimes are, the fact is that every single one of them was preventable. As Gibson emphasizes, every one of the perps was already a criminal, by virtue of being an illegal alien. And they had already committed additional crimes, before killing Americans, but had been shielded by others, namely elected officials (mayors, governors, district attorneys, and sheriffs) or appointed police chief co-conspirators.

One of the cases Gibson reports on, and which I covered, is instructive as to the ruthless criminality of many law enforcement executives.

Bob Clark, 67, was the director of the classic 1983 movie, A Christmas Story.

On April 4, 2007, Hector Velazquez-Nava killed Clark and his son, Ariel Hanrath-Clark, 22, in Los Angeles, when the illegal alien drove the wrong way down the highway, smashing head-on into Clark’s vehicle.

Nava had been deported earlier (and thus his mere presence on American soil was a felony), had been convicted of soliciting a prostitute (he got 24 months probation, and no deportation), and was blitzed at triple the legal alcohol limit.

Some police official formulated the talking point, whereby police needed to build trust with “immigrant” communities, who were supposedly hard-working and law-abiding, but beset by “illegal immigrant” gangs. The key to developing trust was by de-policing—not enforcing immigration laws.

This was sophistry. The “immigrants” [sic] were all criminals! The reality was one in which various groups of alien criminals were victimizing each other and citizens. Some of the criminals were more violent than others, but keep in mind that these people came from countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, etc., where criminality and collective violence were the norm, and every working-class family had some gang members.

They also came from countries where the police were typically corrupt and mistrusted by the populace, who also found them hostile. One study showed that in Mexico people only reported at most 10 percent of crimes to the police. However, consider the context. Crime victims would typically themselves be criminals — victims would be members of gangs, loyal to gangs, or the minority of law-abiding citizens intimidated into silence by gangs.

Gibson does not limit himself to recounting case after case from local newspaper clips. He interviewed numerous family members and survivors of victims. He also provides an overview chapter at the end, on just how big the problem of illegal alien crime is, dispelling myths promoted by media operatives and other members of the Open Borders Lobby, who have pulled the wool over most Americans’ eyes for generations. I wish I could exclude myself from the foregoing, but even I was bamboozled for years by the Big Lie promoted by the mainstream media, whereby being an illegal alien is not a crime.

Recently, advocates and apologists for illegal aliens have been using the talking point ad nauseam: “immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans.” While it is true that, by and large, “immigrants” are law-abiding folks, illegal aliens are not “immigrants”; by the very nature of their presence in this nation, they are criminals….

In just one month (April 2014) illegal aliens committed more than 390 sex crimes against children across the state of North Carolina, or an average of 13 a day. In fact, between January 1, 2014, and June 15, 2015, 5,675 charges of child sexual assault were filed against illegal aliens in the Tarheel State....

A June 7, 2018 DOJ report on illegal alien crime between 2011 and 2018 tells us:

…that between 2011 and 2018, more than 660,000 criminal aliens had run afoul of the law in Texas alone. These findings also included this admonition: “These data do not account for all aliens in the Texas criminal justice system, as they are limited to criminal alien arrestees who have had prior interaction with DHS [Department of Homeland Security] resulting in the collection of their fingerprints.”

During that period, criminal aliens in Texas were responsible for:

1,351 homicides; 7,156 sexual assaults; 9,938 weapons charges; 79,049 assaults; 18,685 burglaries; 79,900 drug charges; 815 kidnappings; 44,882 thefts; 4,292 robberies.

The American citizen-taxpayer is on the hook for approximately $500 million per year for the imprisonment of illegal alien felons in federal prisons alone. However, the majority of incarcerated criminal aliens are in state prisons and local jails.

Fake news “fact-checking” sites like Snopes.com assert that immigration reformers wildly exaggerate the degree of illegal alien crime. There are no great numbers of “undocumented immigrants” [sic] being convicted of murder, they say. Sophistry. Snopes only considers illegal alien killers convicted of “murder,” skirting the fact that most are convicted of vehicular manslaughter or vehicular homicide. (While often used interchangeably, “homicide” is not the same legally as murder.)

I first encountered Dave Gibson’s crime reports at blogs using the old Hearst Examiner name in the mid-to-late 2000s. He has a very readable, succinct, yet informative style. If you’re a true crime buff, like my family, you’ll be familiar with different TV crime shows. Too many, like Investigation Discovery and Dateline, are padded out with commercials and soft passages to fill an hour, while leaving out essential information. Gibson, by contrast, is more like Forensic Files, which gives you the goods in 30 minutes.

Presently, No Safe Places is available exclusively at U.S. Inc.:
https://usinc.org/product-category/books/ ■

References

Stix Vindicated! Academics, Magazine Confirm Big City Police are Disappearing Crime, VDARE, April 26, 2014.
https://vdare.com/articles/stix-vindicated-academics-magazine-confirm-big-city-police-are-disappearing-crime

Immigration, Crime, and the Death of an American Paradise, by Nicholas Stix, The Social Contract, Fall 2017.
https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_28_1/tsc-28-1-stix.shtml

Bulk of Mexican crimes are never reported — study, Reuters, September 20, 2011.
http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-much-of-americas-revolution-in.html

Have Undocumented Immigrants Killed 63,000 American Citizens Since 9/11? By Arturo Garcia and Bethania Palma, Snopes, 22 June 2018.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/have-undocumented-killed-63000-us-9-11/