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Suspect Apprehended In Sabina Rose O’Donnell Murder

On the off chance you haven’t seen it all over the place yet: Police have arrested 18-year-old Donte Johnson (pictured) in connection with the murder and assault of Sabina Rose O’Donnell, which occurred in Northern Liberties on June 2nd. Authorities say that Johnson, who lives on north 11th St., has in fact confessed to the crime; they believe the crime occurred when Johnson attempted to steal O’Donnell’s bike. No word just yet on bail or arraignment details.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 11:43 am.

  • philthydan

    Good! And good for the person that decided not to “stop snitching” so this bastard can get what he deserves.

  • Black (jack) Taco the Eviscerator!

    That would be his mother, Philthy.

  • philthydan

    Yeah, I saw that she had arranged his turning himself in, but didn’t want to assume anything. Either way, I am really glad that my friends that live in that area don’t have to worry about this guy. Not that they should let their guards down anyway.

  • amc4232

    My impression was that an anonymous tipster fingered him. Then the police spotted him and chased him. His mom just arranged his surrender. She didn’t rat him out.

  • hannah

    I am glad he was apprehended – but if only every murder in Philadelphia were so closely covered by the media as Sabina’s. Murders like this happen daily in this city – but it takes being young and beautiful, as she was, as well as an association with a pro-active (and mostly educated) social group to garner the support to put pressure on the public and police to track down her murderer.

    I hope that instead of breathing a sigh of relief that Northern Liberties is safe once more, there is an effort to make every murder a big deal, whether it occurs in your neighborhood or not.

  • lightonfire

    our fucked up court system better not fuck this one up.

  • A Feculent Rainbow

    I vote that Hannah just won the internetz – in its entirety.

  • Rob N

    Ok, but murders do get reported in the papers and get put on television news broadcasts. What does the “media” even mean anymore? Nolibs message board isn’t going to write about a murder in Point Breeze. It is people on the ground caring about what happens. If someone has a crapload of friends and gets killed, of course it is going to be bigger news. And yeah the police might put more effort into solving it. The world, and people, have finite resources.

  • Black (jack) Taco the Eviscerator!

    Rob, many of those other murders also have memorials that draw crowds dwarfing those of the O’Donnell memorial. Way to make some assumptions based on what the city’s preeminent party planners and their media contacts tell you. The difference is most murders don’t happen in trendy moneyed areas, or whatever euphemism Hannah was using. By your “finite resources” claim are you saying the police should assign preferential status to cases involving the concern of the trendy and wealthy? Do you even have a mirror in your house to see yourself?

  • philatrash

    No murder is ever more or less important than the other. Instead of hearing this “pretty/popular girl” argument again and again, why don’t we attempt to dismantle the barriers that make it difficult for some communities to prevent and report violence? How about we hold the media accountable in reporting timely, comprehensive local news? I get the need to be politically correct and all, but take it one step further by working with block captains, civic associations, schools, and community centers.

    I’m just sick of the bitching. Let’s get to work.

  • Rob N

    You think a known drug dealer found capped in his car will get equal attention from the public and the government as a baby’s abduction and murder? You think that it should? You’d have an easier time convincing people not to kill each other in the first place.

  • matt2112

    I think this person should be strung up naked, on display in Northern Liberties, for people to pass by and spit upon. let him hang there until he dies a slow painful death. Maybe then will people be more likely to think before committing such an act

  • http://www.google.com/profiles/seratide dx

    @Rob: everybody is loved by somebody, dude. even assholes like you, me, and jacksauce. so yeah, we SHOULD give the same amount of concern to all murders, regardless of how the victim managed to put food on the table or how old they are.

  • A Feculent Rainbow

    “Instead of hearing this “pretty/popular girl” argument again and again”

    Oh yeah, that line was played out unlike coverage of Sabina’s murder. Damned if I didn’t go one day in the last two weeks without seeing her name or picture at least 5 times a day.

    Maybe you missed Hannah’s post as she seems to be advocating the same thing: “I hope that instead of breathing a sigh of relief that Northern Liberties is safe once more, there is an effort to make every murder a big deal, whether it occurs in your neighborhood or not.” Or, as you say, “Let’s get to work.”

    @RobN: though ‘the squeaky wheel get’s the grease’ makes sense from a political/pragmatic point, the police are hypothetically OBLIGED to work just as hard on the case of the dead black dealer as they would on the case of the dead blond babygirl. Hypothetically, they must serve in the interest of this shit called ‘justice.’

    @both: though we may be waving our retard fists at the sun and nothing will change, it’s still worth noting blatant media/justice discrepancies such as pretty/missing white woman syndrome. That being said, I hope this guy (should he be found guilty – beyond a reasonable doubt- in court ) gets raped like crazy throughout his lengthy prison stay.

  • Rob N

    @A Feculent Rainbow — but that is my point. Jurisdictional issues aside, the cops aren’t going to work as hard on solving the rape of this suspect that you and many others would advocate as they would a young girl riding her bike in Nolibs. People make value judgments all the time. It is necessary to get through the day.

  • http://SCOTTPMCBRIDE.com UNCKLE-TICKLE

    This should have posted with “Man, thats good mother****ing news” as it’s header. This animal turning himself in doesn’t bring back Sabina and it doesn’t make everything right again but hopefully this can bring some closure to Sabina’s family so they can begin healing.

  • mw_217

    Sigh. Why didn’t you just take the bike man? Fuck.

  • aenima1967

    Hannah – It’s not so much about being young and beautiful as it is about being an innocent girl RANDOMLY attacked for the bike she was riding. Now, how this attempt at theft escalated into rape and murder… who knows. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this 18 year old kid was like thousands of other young kids in the city- an animal. Philly somehow breeds this type of aggression. The trash running around in that town have NO concept of right and wrong. They do whatever they want, where ever, and to who ever. Remember the kids who beat the Starbucks manager a few years back on the subway platform just because they could? But to get back to the issue at hand here though, the attention… Murders like this DON’T happen daily as you stated. What DOES happen daily is gangs of these little shits shooting each other over simple disagreements, perceived “disrespect”, drug deals gone wrong, and all other manner of criminal activity. The reason that this doesn’t get the same coverage, right or wrong, is because no one cares about little criminals running around killing each other as long as they keep it among themselves. The state that these kids’ lives are in is extremely unfortunate, but don’t tell me that they haven’t made stupid choices that lead to them having a gun in their face, or holding the gun, or raping and killing a 20 year old girl for her bike in the lot directly across the street from where I used to live. RIP Sabina, your future was taken away by someone who never had one.

  • A Feculent Rainbow

    @ Rob N: fair enough. I think we can both agree that it sucks though.

  • Black (jack) Taco the Eviscerator!

    Rob N, your fiction relies on some assumption that there are “all the other murders in Philadelphia” and then there’s the O’Donnell murder. That is incredibly head in the sand drinking the kool-aid stupidity. Good people are murdered in Philadelphia, and many go unsolved. You want a pretty white boy? Look up Beau Zeibel. No one’s found his killer and its 2 years and a day since his murder. Too bad he didn’t live in NoLibs.

  • Black (jack) Taco the Eviscerator!

    aenima, don’t believe the hype either. Yes, the majority of the murders in Philly have been written off as “beefs” between young men, a lot of murders happen as part of robbery, home invasion, and rape. The world’s bigger than Northern Liberties.

  • rascal b. schuylkillian

    There are plenty of murders in the city, all sad. But the hard (and very sad) reality is that the majority of those murdered are fallen by their brethren of similar background – young low-income minority males who have dropped out of high school.

    It is easy to say the media sensationalized this case because she was a young pale skinned gal, pointing to the racial bias of the media by not giving similar air/print/interwebs time to darker minorities that get murdered. But, the reality is, her murder is not like the other common murders in the city that are a by-product of illegal activity, the drug trade and petty street beef. Hers was a senseless, random act perpetrated by someone who likely would have been shot himself if given another year or two on the streets.

  • hannah

    I simply cannot tolerate discussion of one life being worth more than another. Sure, if tons of drug dealers and mobsters began disappearing (cue superhero movie trailer) it would be harder to find complaints, but as dx put it, “everyone is loved by someone.”

    I’m not trying to disrespect Sabina or downplay the horror and sadness of her death. But you cannot deny that her circumstances facilitated the capture of her murderer – that if a poor, black, high school dropout on 63rd street had been killed, we never would have known it was for the sake of a bicycle. That it would have been quickly forgotten.

    Sabina had a community to support her family, keep the public and police aware, and fight for the arrest of her killer. Not everyone has that.

    Imagine an ideal world in which all murders got this sort of attention. That the public held the media and police accountable for reporting accurately and responding efficiently, as happened in Sabina’s case. I imagine that there would be fewer murders.

    I don’t really have a clear plan on what’s next – how to create a forum or environment to facilitate information exchange and to encourage action. I don’t even know whether there is a feasible way for the Philadelphia community as a whole to work to bring justice to other murders in this city the same way the NoLib community did for Sabina. It’s worth thinking about, however.

    But I can tell you one thing – deciding that all murders that happen in poor black neighborhoods are less meaningful because the people there are caught in a cycle of poverty and violence is NOT the way to start.

  • philatrash

    Honestly, ?uestlove elaborated on some of this more eloquently – to much criticism – than I ever could as a white female –

    http://citypaper.net/blogs/criticalmass/2010/06/16/uestlove-on-donte-johnso/

  • Rob N

    Taco, what “hype” are you talking about? I don’t even know the point you are trying to make. Beau’s murder was on Americas Most Wanted. You think that isn’t media attention, or people caring?

  • philatrash

    “But I can tell you one thing – deciding that all murders that happen in poor black neighborhoods are less meaningful because the people there are caught in a cycle of poverty and violence is NOT the way to start.”

    Hell yeah. I may have been a little snappy earlier – I honestly want to straddle the line of being sensitive to Sabina’s case AND the problems that exist in Philadelphia. But I could not agree more with this.

  • Rob N

    @hannah:”Imagine an ideal world in which all murders got this sort of attention.” While you are in that world, ask everyone to stop killing, too. If this suspect did it and got convicted, no I wouldn’t care if he was murdered in prison. I’d want his murderer to be punished, but it wouldn’t merit attention equal to what Sabrina got.

  • maus

    Many of these comments are too close to bigoted for my comfort, especially this reference to lynching:

    “I think this person should be strung up naked, on display in Northern Liberties, for people to pass by and spit upon. let him hang there until he dies a slow painful death.”

    Think about how it sounds when you say this about a black man. Be more thoughtful with your words.

  • Sdot

    @maus “Think about how it sounds when you say this about a black man. Be more thoughtful with your words.”

    Trust me. These feelings would be the same for any man of any race. “thoughtful” would be the LAST thing I would consider being if I saw this kid.

  • maurclan

    would Sabina classify herself as “white”?

    Also, why all the animosity against nolibs? I don’t think that most people living there are wealthy or feel more entitled than their neighbors in the north. It’s not Rittenhouse, guys.

  • A Feculent Rainbow

    The US Census is not counting Hispanic/Latino/Spanish as a race. On some quantifying forms you can distinguish between non-Hispanic white and just white but she would still be “white” for the purpose of statistics. You can certainly claim that she was pretty and fair-skinned regardless of the ethnicity(ies) with which she may have identified.