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Pretzel Logic
Nearly 37 years ago, a young woman in Queens, NY, named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death while more than three dozen people watched and did nothing, saying later they just didn’t want to get involved.
A nation was outraged, conferences were called and the press was full of stories about “Genovese Syndrome,” an utter and appalling lack of concern for human life.
Move ahead the clock almost four decades and Genovese Syndrome persists.
Witness the sickening display put on by Philadelphia’s “bravest” and “finest” last spring as they sat on their collective duffs and watched as a man drowned after jumping off the Falls Bridge. That incident, captured on video by a Philly TV News cameraman and reported shortly thereafter in City Paper and Feb. 12 in a remarkably chilling Dateline NBC segment, showed that no matter how many lessons were learned in the wake of the Genovese tragedy, we still have a long way to go.
Fortunately, not everyone in Philadelphia is as reluctant to get involved as the police and firefighters who did nothing while 38-year-old Matthew Beaufort drowned.
On that day, Garrett Cupples and Steven Lloyd — two complete strangers who just happened to be in Fairmount Park that day — risked their lives by jumping in to help.
And on Monday, Feb. 5, another tragedy may have been averted altogether when a woman witnessing a man beat his daughter in the Municipal Services Building stepped in to intervene.
It was the day of the last big snowstorm, the one that took everyone by surprise. Sharon Suleta, an attorney with Ballard Spahr, had just visited the L&I counter in the concourse of the Municipal Services Building (MSB) when she went over to the newsstand to buy a paper and heard a little girl screaming.
“Don’t,” the little girl yelled, according to Suleta. “Please don’t, daddy. Please don’t. I’m sorry.”
Suleta says she watched in horror as the short, stocky man dragged the little girl, dressed in a snowsuit, into the men’s room. The horror grew to outrage, says Suleta, when she heard the man repeatedly smacking the girl. A particularly frightening sound considering that it was heard through a closed door, over the terrified screams of a child.
“It went on and on,” says Suleta. “He hit her eight or nine times.”
Suleta says she looked around the bustling concourse hoping to find help.
“I thought someone would stop him but nobody did,” she says. Realizing that nobody was going to do anything, Suleta opened the bathroom door and told the man, “You better stop hitting her or I’m calling the cops.”
After that, Suleta heard nothing, which she found hardly reassuring. “Is she unconscious?” Suleta recalls wondering. “Is she hurt?”
She says she called a guard over and asked him to go into the men’s room. The guard went in, but just saw the man standing there with the girl. When the man walked out of the bathroom with the girl, he glared at Suleta and she glowered back.
The man was apparently at the MSB to visit the Water Department. Suleta went over to the Water Department counter and says she became frustrated by the seeming lack of concern.
According to Suleta, “You should have asked for his name,” was how one Water Department employee responded to her query about the man’s name. “I’m not giving it. Besides, he’s not even one of our customers.”
That really ticked off Suleta, who then called her friend, Robin Schatz, City Councilman Frank DiCicco’s chief of staff. Like Suleta, Schatz found the Water Department employee “to be really obnoxious.” (Tuesday morning, a guard and Water Department employees refused to talk about the incident. A visit to the Water Department offices prompted a promise of a phone call, but that never happened.)
Schatz then contacted the Department of Human Services (DHS) and suggested Suleta call 911. But by then, it was too late. Without a name of the alleged child beater, DHS cannot do anything. By the time the police arrived, the man was long gone.
What Suleta did “was really powerful,” says DHS executive director Alba Martinez. “If society condones these things and turns their back on these things, then they will continue to happen.”
Martinez and police say that, in similar situations, witnesses should call 911 immediately. Martinez says that if a witness knows the assailant, then he or she should contact DHS via their hotline (215-683-6100). DHS, says Martinez, will initiate an investigation, depending on the severity of the incident.
In April, says Martinez, DHS will launch a massive citywide education program as part of Child Abuse Prevention Month. The program, she says, is aimed at educating parents on how to handle stressful situations and to educate the public on what to do if they witness an incident as Suleta did.
As for Suleta, she says she still wonders if she did the right thing.
“Did I do just enough to make it worse?” she asks herself. “Will the man beat her even more severely now?”
Suleta may have her doubts. But there is no doubt the family and friends of Kitty Genovese wish that someone like her, or Garrett Cupples or Steven Lloyd, had been around the night the 28-year-old bar manager was killed.
