November 10, 2007

"Don't say nothing!"

So yelled Natavia Lowery's mother as she saw what the Daily News calls "the petite suspect" being "hauled off in handcuffs to court." But Lowery had already confessed to killing the wealthy "punk-rock pioneer" Linda Stein. According to the police, she said she "bashed in the Realtor's head with a yoga stick after she blew pot smoke in her face and made a racial crack."
"Get the f---ing e-mails! How can you be so f---ing slow!" Stein supposedly bellowed, a police source said.

Stein, who had private yoga sessions in her $2.5 million pad, was waving a 4-pound strength-building yoga stick at Lowery as she yelled, the assistant told cops.

After Lowery retrieved the e-mails, Stein offered to buy her lunch as a peace offering.

"I've got my own money. I don't need you to buy me lunch," the assistant said indignantly.

"Black people don't have any money," Stein retorted, according to Lowery. "Save your money and I'll buy you lunch."

An enraged Lowery grabbed the yoga stick from Stein and hit her with it a half-dozen times until she was face-down in a pool of blood, police said.
Defense lawyers will have to contend with the fact that Lowery spent a long time calmly cleaning up the penthouse after the bludgeoning,
Her trips in and out were captured on surveillance tape, which showed her nonchalantly carrying out a bag, police said. She checked the bottom of her shoes once after leaving, possibly examining them for blood, sources said.

"She looks quite normal when she's coming in and out of the apartment," said NYPD Detective Antonio Rivera.
Once could argue that she reverted to a robotic mental state. Calmly cleaning up the penthouse makes no sense if you're leaving a brutally beaten body in it. If you were thinking rationally, you'd want the scene to look as if an outsider did it, but an outsider wouldn't clean up. Therefore, Lowery could contend that the calm behavior after the murder was actually evidence of insanity. I haven't read about cases where a theory like that was attempted, so I don't know how well it might play, nor do I know of any scholarly writing in the field of psychology that might support such a theory. I'm just tossing it out as a possibility.

You have to also explain the fact that Lowery stole Stein's ATM card and withdrew $800. I'd say that as a personal assistant, a methodical criminal could have found a much more effective way to extract money from the victim. And with that kind of access, if she had planned to kill Stein, Lowery could have figured out a more insidious way to do it. The fact that her instincts led her to clean up the crime scene seems to indicate that if she were planning the murder, she would have chosen a method that didn't create such a bloody mess.

12 comments:

AllenS said...

One could also argue the Second Hand Smoke Defense: "...Linda Stein's assistant confessed she bashed in the Realtor's head with a yoga stick after she blew pot smoke in her face..."

"I did enhale", Natavia told the police, "I think the drug made me do it".

Mortimer Brezny said...

I think it is odd that no one is questioning that this upstanding real estate broker was smoking pot.

rhhardin said...

Can she help it if the realtor has fragile bones? Eat more cheese.

Hat tip to the Lizzie Grubman tapes
interview 1
interview 2

Ron said...

Sadly, another yoga-related homicide! If she had only been peaceably watching,say, The Wild Bunch on TV she'd be alive today!

Palladian said...

Yeah, I was wondering about the same thing, Mort.

Yoga and pot...

Palladian said...

Did you notice this lovely little comment from the article?

"Lowery's family charged cops targeted her because she's black and said Stein's daughters should be suspects.

"They know who did it," said one male relative. "But whenever there's someone involved with power and influence black people get scapegoated."

"Tell them to check on the two daughters [Mandy Stein and Samantha Stein-Wells]. They have the means and the motive."

Too bad they can't reanimate the body of Johnnie Cochran to serve as defense counsel.

Cedarford said...

Palladian - Did you notice this lovely little comment from the article?

"Lowery's family charged cops targeted her because she's black and said Stein's daughters should be suspects.

"They know who did it," said one male relative. "But whenever there's someone involved with power and influence black people get scapegoated."


An ugly fact is that blacks now commit the majority of murders, armed robberies, and reported rapes in the USA....and a study has shown that you are 53 times more likely to be murdered by a blac stranger if you are white or Asian than vice versa.

Coincentally with those dismaying statistics, black community's blame deflection and excuse-making about their "people" who are perps, is on the rise.

Black people are always blamed for crimes whites actually did.
Only blacks are arrested.
The black rapist, robber, murderer is not a real criminal - but someone compelled to act that way by poverty, racism, or name-calling.

Cops now say it is common for black arrestees to accuse them of making racial slurs. And that blacks arrested for violence more and more claim the storeowner they rob, the women they rape - provoked it by shouting "nigger!".

And the MSM enables much of it by taking up the argument that the victim was at fault by being racist or the justice system was for "targeting blacks" while "letting white robbers go free".

And maintaining the PC media narrative even when the facts reveal the reportage was agenda-driven and wrong.

An insurance executive in Florida was abducted from a parking garage, raped in the woods, murdered, and her killer was caught with her credit cards. His story was of "racial rage" where he just asked the woman for food money and she told him to "get his nigger ass out of her way". The media lapped it up, along with the usual NAACP and ACLU types as sign of the racism that cripples fine young men...The media reported his momma called him an honor student and a "good boy", and said that they were investigating if there were any past incidents of racism by the executive, and mentioned that one of her black subordinates at work said she was "dismissive". Then the trial happened.
Video showed the black guy approached the woman from behind and put a gun to her head...so "get out of my way, nigger" became the lawyer saying his client must have been confused and the woman called him a nigger in the car as he ordered her out in the woods, or maybe when he pistol-whipped her...And sure enough, one reporter said it could still be a case where the executive still might have provoked her own rape and murder with racist remarks, if the accused was to be believed that he only wanted her car, cash, jewelry, and credit cards.

The way I see it in the Stein case and others where the killer is making excuses is the dead can't defend themselves, the killer has every reason to lie, and the media should avoid as much as possible the tarnishing of murder victims as racists, sex perverts, druggies, betrayers - that provoked the murderer.

Let the legal system work it through.

The enabling media allowing the murderer to publicly trash their victim is more repugnant morally than them publishing an associate of someone like Stein publicly remarking after her death all the reasons why she was a scumbag. If we have norms that say that people who knew the dead are obligated to give that person respect in their passing and not impugne their character so close to death - we should have norms that tell the media we dislike them enabling the perp to slime the victim.

Trooper York said...

It's a shame that her assistant bashed her head in, but I ran into her a few times in the old CBGB days and had some dealings with her in her real estate career, and ya know I thought it was only a matter of time till something like that happened. She lasted a lot longer than I thought she would. I figured someone would have bashed her head in by 1986. She really beat the odds. In the Godfather, Don Vito said about Luca Brasi "He goes through life, begging to have someone kill him." That was Ms. Stein. If you looked up the C word in the dictionary, you would find her picture. That's the way most of the rich assholes in New York treat service people such as doormen, waiters, assistants etc. I guess they never had the experience of sitting next to someone on a barstool and if you said the wrong thing, or didn't treat them like human beings, it would be go time. The sense of entitlement of a lot of these people is staggering. It's a lot like some of the people on this blog, if they talked to people in real life instead of on the net; they would get an ass kicking real quick. And once something like that starts, it can go downhill real, real fast.

Unknown said...

"... when we got in the limo Halston was yelling at the driver because he couldn't find the black radio station, he said, 'What do you mean you don't know where the black station is — you're black, aren't you?' And then the driver said he couldn't see, meaning the radio dial, and Halston said, 'What do you mean you can't see, you're driving, aren't you?' and then he told me that you have to yell at the help or they don't respect you. He has over a hundred people working for him and they're all so terrified of him, they're always asking each other what kind of a mood he's in."

—Andy Warhol, diary entry for January 5, 1978, quoted in The Assassin's Cloak

Ann Althouse said...

Cedarford, if Lowery were making up a story about how racism enraged her, don't you think she'd invent a more inflammatory statement than "Black people don't have any money. Save your money and I'll buy you lunch." There isn't even an epithet. And there's an invitation to lunch. The woman is dead. There was no one else there. Lowery could have made up any conversation she wanted, so why did she come up with "Black people don't have any money. Save your money and I'll buy you lunch"? The best answer is: It was the truth.

Trooper York said...

Most people can deal with a good natured insult or two and give it right back if they know where you are coming from. But the condescending dismissal that certain rich people have toward the working class attacks their dignity to a degree that is quite dangerous. But they don't have a clue. The sense of entitlement is stunning. Sometimes I am in line at the bakery or the butcher shop and one of these beauties is acting out and the worker looks at me and I look at him and we both raise our eyebrows and if it was a Tarantino movie we would put his face in the slicer, but the working guy just has to take it like a man. These are the douches that would never think to slip the deli guy twenty at Christmas time, it's only a token but the guy really appreciates it and knows that every little bit helps. These workers now are usually Mexican or Arab or from Eastern Europe. Most of these idiots who act like gods gift are your card carrying lefties who have the Hillary stickers on their bumpers and che t-shirts, but to them a working stiff is just scum who should jump too when they fart. I just feel lucky that when the revolution comes, I will have a few people who testify for me in the show trial. Power to the pepperoni slicers dude.

Unknown said...

Mortimer Brezny said..."I think it is odd that no one is questioning that this upstanding real estate broker was smoking pot."

Yeah, that's exactly where the police should focus their attention.

And can you imagine that?

An "upstanding real estate broker...smoking pot."

What is the world coming to?