A journalist and advocate who rose from homelessness and addiction to serve as a spokesperson for Philadelphia’s most vulnerable was shot and killed at his home early Monday, police said.

Josh Kruger, 39, was shot seven times at about 1:30 a.m. and collapsed in the street after seeking help, police said. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later. Police believe the door to his Point Breeze home was unlocked or the shooter knew how to get in, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. No arrests have been made and no weapons have been recovered, they said.

Authorities haven’t spoken publicly about the circumstances surrounding the killing.

  • halfempty@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’m always a bit suspicious when a Journalist is killed like this. Who were those who may have been threatened by what he published?

    • prole@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      The people in these comments talking like this is “just another day in a US city” have no fucking idea what they’re talking about. This is not the kind of violence that randomly happens. This person was clearly targeted.

      They also fail to grasp the concept of “per capita” crime/murder statistics.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Per capita? Really? Try per capita gun murders around the world and see what countries the US keeps company with. I mean, your argument is basically because there are lots of people, being shot is NBD because the odds are low because there are lots of people?

        And yeah, again, compared to other places this is the kind of violence that happens in the US.

        However, this was a targeted shooting. A deliberate murder. That does tend to be a more rare occurrence, but it’s dishonest to break it out and treat it separately from the overall use of crime related gun use in the US.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          What? Way to miss the point entirely. Not only that, but you’ve completely misrepresented my argument.

          First: yes, this was clearly a targeted shooting, so this discussion doesn’t really apply to this specific case. However…

          I haven’t said anything was no big deal, just pointing out basic statistics. Using the concept of “per capita,” when discussing phenomena among very large groups of people, is one of the (if not the) only ways to glean any valuable information from the data.

          1,000 gun crimes seems like a lot in a town of 23,000 people. 1,000 gun crimes in a city of 2,000,000 people? Not so much… (obviously these numbers were made up to make a point)

          • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            No, I didn’t miss your point. I understand perfectly what you meant. However, you did miss my pointing out of your use of statistics via per capita as an argument to water down risk against the broader view of the US gun crime rate vs the rest of the world to point out that yes, Indeed, this is a US problem.

            • prole@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              If I implied anywhere that I thought it wasn’t a US problem, that was not my intention at all. Clearly it is.

              • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Per capita rates of gun violence in the United States are almost 90 times higher than the United Kingdom, for instance.

                  • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Actually, I was agreeing with you. I hadn’t posted anything prior, so you couldn’t have been agreeing or disagreeing with me. I think you confused me for the other person. 😀

        • jasory@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          “A targeted shooting a deliberate murder… that does tend to be more rare”

          Accidental fatal shootings are well known to exceed intentional ones.

          It’s rare to get an article on individual targeted killings, but they do in fact comprise the majority of killings. So no, this is not a rare form of killing at all, it’s simply being reported because it’s another journalist.

    • oxjox@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      https://www.inquirer.com/crime/josh-kruger-killed-point-breeze-shooting-philadelphia-journalist-20231002.html

      “Either the door was open, or the offender knew how to get the door open,” he said. “We just don’t know yet.”

      Detectives believe Kruger’s death may have been the result of a domestic dispute or may have been drug-related, according to three law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said police investigators recovered troubling text messages between Kruger and a former partner. Investigators also recovered methamphetamine inside Kruger’s bedroom, the sources said.

      In recent months, he’d written on social media about a variety of alarming incidents at his home.

      In April, he posted that an ex-partner had broken into his home. “The door was locked, so he had somehow obtained a copy of my keys,” he wrote. He had allowed the man, whom he’d known for years “before his troubles,” to stay at his house briefly after being released from jail. He said he was able to deescalate the situation and the man eventually left, and he changed his locks.

      In August, someone threw a rock through his home window, he said. Then, about two weeks ago, he wrote on Facebook that someone came to his house searching for their boyfriend — “a man I’ve never met once in my entire life.” The person called themselves “Lady Diabla, the She-Devil of the Streets” and threatened him, he wrote.

      • x4740N@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is why journalists should invest in a dead man’s switch that will automatically publish stuff I the journalists cannot check in

        One last fuck you from the grave

    • Nahvi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Same here.

      I have an uncle who was killed due to an article he was doing research for. Sadly, he ended up in a coma and then someone came back to finish the job. It had a large impact on my mother and her siblings, though it was a few years before I was born. I had always wondered how much of it was an exaggeration until a couple years ago when we found an article saying basically the same things the aunts and uncles always had.

        • Nahvi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That is a great idea, but no. He was living in another part of the country from them at the time of the initial attack. The article was written in that area.