Investigating Cleveland's side of their failed efforts to retain anti-gun laws

Tom Shafer thanked Paul and John for coming out and said he is glad that Dr. Klein's story has a happy ending.  So many times you read unhappy endings.

Shafer amused the audience with his ornery investigation to get Cleveland's side of the recent story about that city's failed efforts to retain it's anti-gun laws despite Ohio's laws pre-empting more restrictive local gun laws.

Cleveland's population has dwindled down to 400,000.  It's a classic rust-belt city where factories and industries have closed and people have moved away seeking jobs, leaving a lot of retired folks and a sizeable, entrenched urban population living among  urban decay.

His first call for information netted him a partisan Cleveland city employee who hung up after hollering at him.  "She was a real live one!"   Shafer laughed.

So Shafer called  the city legal department and talked with a much more professional woman named Maurene Harper.

The woman defended the city's position, even though it wasn't her case.  The mayor, she says, is a gun owner (she repeated that a lot), not an anti-gun zealot (where have we heard that before?).

He asked her, "So, what were your restrictions that you spent four years and all this money trying to keep?"

She said they wanted gun registration and a list of concealed carry license holders in the city.  They also wanted local restrictions on where you could carry.

She began to get defensive when Shafer asked how much money and resources were put into this suit.  She said they only used in-house lawyers, so Shafer asked what they weren't doing while they were fighting this case.  She got more defensive and touchy and told him she was not going to go there.

Maureen Harper gets an A in Shafer's book.  She told it the way it really was, what Cleveland tried to do, and why they wanted to keep their prohibitions of home rule.



The Honeybee Murders

Shafer also talked about the curious case of George Amaya from little old Rankin, Illinois.  He was the guy who got shot at the Orland Park tanning salon while trying to tie up the employees and a customer.  It turns out that he was the "Honeybee Killer" from northwest Indiana from earlier in 2010 and he may have been a serial murderer of prostitutes as well.

Shafer broke out a map to illustrate how distant Amaya's place in Rankin was to the suburban tanning salon where he died and where the Honeybee murders were committed.

"Why did this guy drive all that way to commit crimes?" Shafer asked.

It was a miracle this guy was caught the way he was.  He had ordered this customer of the tanning salon to tie up the girls working there.  When Amaya put the Colt revolver down to reach for the rope, the customer took the gun and shot Amaya, killing him.

This one had the potential of being another Lane Bryant multiple homicide but this guy put a stop to it.  For his good deed, the tanning salon is giving the man and his wife free tans for life and $5,000.

The gun's ballistics matched the Honeybee murders, surprising everyone.  The authorities had no idea this guy was a suspect.  He wasn't on anyone's radar.  Shafer made himself a vow a long time ago.  Nobody's tying his hands behind his back.  Nobody's putting him into a car and taking him to some other spot against his will.  Shafer guarantees when you allow that to happen, nothing good comes afterwards.  If you're taken to a secondary crime scene, Shafer said, "he doesn't buy you a steak dinner or offer you a manicure and a pedicure."

They interviewed Amaya's neighbors.  He was a loner with a filthy house, probably with undiagnosed mental problems.  He lived by himself, never had friends over, never was out and about in the neighborhood.  He was totally non-social.  But what he had was this hidden criminal life.  He'd been running loose, shooting people at random, attacking hookers, tying up people in tanning salons and Lord knows what else until he was finally shot dead during an attack.  This Amaya was a one man crime wave.

Shafer's going to poke around Will County a little and see what he can find out.  They are a little sensitive about the case after arresting a cop for the Honeybee murders then releasing him a few days later after checking his alibi.  Of course, the cop is more than a little pissed off about getting arrested and his name besmirched by the media.  This is the same prosecutor who's done such a fine job with the Drew Peterson case, by the way.


Commentaries by Tom Shafer