On Nov. 11, 1994–30 years ago Monday– Eddie Polec was murdered by a group of suburban teenagers who came into the Fox Chase section of Philadelphia looking for blood.
Polec, 16, was bludgeoned to death with baseball bats and kicked with steel-toed boots, according to testimony. Polec was an innocent bystander waiting for his brother on the steps of St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church when the marauding boys, mainly from Abington High School, caught up to him as he ran from them. One threw a baseball bat, knocking him to the ground, where they continued to beat him with bats and kick him as he pleaded for his life.
The brutal murder shocked the Delaware Valley and drew national attention.
It had taken the police about 45 minutes to arrive, even as scores of neighbors called for help as the group of suburban teenage boys terrorized the community.
Officers found Polec, who was a senior at Cardinal Dougherty High School, on the steps of the church where he’d been an altar boy, unconscious, beaten and bleeding, cradled in the arms of a teenage girl.
At the time, the city’s 911 system was blamed for slow police response. Instead of filing a lawsuit against the city, Eddie Polec’s parents, Kathy and John, asked the city to overhaul the 911 system that failed their son that night. With public outcry over Polec’s death, former Mayor Ed Rendell, later governor, called for sanctions against the 911 operators.
John Polec declined to comment for this article.
Many people were shocked by the murder since it didn’t fit the city-suburban stereotype.
According to testimony at the subsequent trial, an Abington girl was in a parking lot at the Fox Chase McDonalds when some boys threw a cup of soda into her car window. From that incident, a rumor spread through Abington High School that Fox Chase boys had sexually assaulted an Abington girl.
The following Friday night, a group of teenage boys armed with baseball bats entered Fox Chase, ready to rumble.
“From a statistical standpoint, groups of young men are always going to a risky cohort for murder,” said Thomas Hogan, the former Chester County District Attorney, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank. “This ‘iron law of crime’ has been true throughout time and cuts across all geographic, racial, and economic lines. So, while the facts of the Polec murder are terrible, they are neither surprising nor unpredictable.”
“I remember the case because I grew up in Abington, and I was [Montgomery County] first assistant DA at the time,” said lawyer Bruce L. Castor Jr., who became the Montco DA. “Ed Rendell took a lot of heat over the 911 failures, but my recollection is that he inherited that system, and the Eddie Polec murder led to major upgrades in equipment and training for dispatchers.”
Defendants Nicholas Pinero, then 18, of Abington; Bou Khathavong, then 18, of Rosyln; Dawan Alexander, then 18, of Crestmont; Carlo Johnson, then 20, of Elkins Park; Thomas Crook, then 20, of Hatboro; and Anthony Rienzi, then 18, of Warminster, stood trial for some five weeks in a Philadelphia courtroom. The six were charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy. Johnson, Alexander and Pinero were also charged with aggravated assault.
Another defendant, Kevin Convey, then 19, of Meadowbrook, had pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, and Convey testified against the others.
A jury convicted Pinero, Crook and Rienzi of third-degree murder. Alexander was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, and Johnson and Khathavong were convicted of conspiracy but cleared of homicide.
Assistant DA Joseph Casey used a baseball bat, found in the church parking lot, as an effective tool, banging it loudly to show the jury how the assailants had used it to strike Polec.
The jury also saw gruesome pictures of Polec’s mangled body.
“People are hardwired to search out the root causes for why vicious crimes occur, particularly when the violent criminals are young and from relatively good backgrounds,” said Castor. “When teens commit ‘unimaginable’ crimes of violence shocking to the conscience, there is this human urge to figure out ‘what went wrong?’ and try and explain it. Not to ‘fix’ the problem, you understand, though people claim that. It is so people can differentiate themselves from ‘what happened with those kids.’ To tell themselves and one another that those things won’t happen in their family because ‘our kids’ are not like those kids. Of course, their kids are like those kids.
“This desire to find a cause for evil manifesting itself is a coping mechanism — a means of being able to sleep at night by conning yourself that evil will not visit your home and your life. You see, evil is out there, and nobody knows when or where on whom it will strike. Parents can do everything ‘right,’ and evil will still find a way,” said Castor.
“And those kids who murdered Eddie Polec? They’re out of prison by now going about their lives in their 40s, and Eddie? He’s still dead.”
