There has been much in the news recently about Reyna Aguirre-Alonso, the North Philadelphia bodega clerk killed in cold blood on Jan. 23 because she was, or was believed to have been, a witness to a murder last November.
On Jan. 27, police arrested 23-year-old Jorge Aldea, a young man who had a long rap sheet and had been in jail on a gun-possession charge — but who had been able to post his own bond after a judge had lowered it, just a little over a week before Alonso was shot. Mayor Michael Nutter has lashed out at the judge; the District Attorney has pointed fingers at police, saying the DA wasn't notified that Aldea was the main suspect in the November murder; and police have shot back, saying the DA was indeed informed.
But the accusation that no one wants to talk about is the one made by residents to newspaper reporters following the murder: that police exposed Alonso to danger by approaching her several times in public, in full view, presumably, of the dealers outside.
"They picked her up three, four times. Everybody saw ... they set her up," one resident of the neighborhood told the Daily News.
"Last week, she was taken to the police station — she didn't want to go," Alonso's brother-in-law told the Inquirer.
She was scared in the days before her killing, another neighbor said.
Asked why police would have approached a possible murder witness so visibly, police spokesman Lt. Raymond Evers told CP, "That's how we do things. We pick up people and interview them."
Alonso, Evers added, was not in the city's witness protection program.
One question is: Why not? If police believed Alonso to have been a witness to a murder — as her neighbors seem to have believed — why was she not being protected?
Evers explained that Alonso had volunteered information about the case: "If she was afraid, she wouldn't have went in" for questioning, he told CP. Yet neighbors say exactly the opposite: that she was afraid, and that she didn't want to go in. What changed her mind?
In a city where 40 percent of all murders are going unsolved and whose mayor has trumpeted a "start snitching" campaign and offered higher rewards for tips, we now have a case in which residents perceive — right or wrong — that a murder witness was killed in part because she was exposed and left unprotected by police. That fear is a disincentive to speak up that won't easily be bought away.
