On April 24, Robert Crimo III was sentenced to seven consecutive life terms along with 50 years in prison for each person injured. That was in Illinois for a massacre, which three years after it happened, has likely faded from most people’s memories.
Crimo pleaded guilty, and so a painful trial was avoided around the mass shooting at the Independence Day parade in Highland Park in 2022.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported, “The sentencing hearing, which began Wednesday and finished Thursday morning, included testimony from multiple survivors and relatives of those killed in the shooting at the Independence Day parade.”
The fatalities were Irina and Kevin McCarthy, Jacki Sundheim, Katherine Goldstein, Eduardo Uvaldo, Nicolas Toledo and Stephen Straus. The McCarthys, at 35 and 37, were the youngest of the dead; the others were between 63 and 88. An 8-year-old boy whose spinal cord was severed was among the more than 40 gunshot victims who lived.
“Crimo, 24, decided to not appear in court on Wednesday or Thursday,” the paper said, “The shooter's parents, who have attended most court proceedings, were also not present.”
Later in the piece, the Sun-Times reported, “Crimo had asked to come up during the hearing, which, on Thursday, he had declined through his lawyers to attend as it extended into its second day. Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart could be heard telling survivors in the gallery that it was an unprecedented situation.
“Minutes later, court resumed with one of Crimo’s attorneys saying he decided not to come after all. Crimo had sought to raise an issue about access to religious books — not about the sentencing, the attorney said.”
Crimo has never expressed remorse for his actions.
The shooter had been expected to take a plea deal in June of last year but at the last minute — in front of gunshot victims, other survivors of the parade and family members of the deceased — declared he’d changed his mind. And so a trial was set for March of this year.
He wasn’t the only family member who had vacillated on whether to take a deal before finally agreeing to at the last minute.
The Sun-Times recalled in April, “Crimo’s father, Robert Crimo Jr., pleaded guilty last year to reckless conduct, admitting to signing the Firearm Owner's Identification card for his son to apply for gun ownership two years before the shooting. As a part of the plea deal, Crimo Jr. was sentenced to 60 days in jail and two years of probation.
“The younger Crimo was 19 at the time he got the card and too young to get a FOID card on his own. Illinois at the time required people ages 18, 19 or 20 to have parent or guardian authorization.”
On July 4, 2022, Bobby Crimo, then 21, the son of a local store-owner and mayoral candidate, who’d expressed violent intentions during his teenage years, shimmied up the side of a building and from a rooftop perch fired on the Highland Park parade.
A CNN report datelined Highland Park, July 8, said: “The Fourth of July parade shooter's location -- concealed on a rooftop along Highland Park's Central Avenue -- made it hard for law enforcement to figure out immediately where bullets were raining from when he opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle, the Illinois city's police chief said Thursday.
"‘The noise was bouncing off the buildings. People were pointing in different directions,’” Chief Lou Jogmen told CNN.
David Baum, a long-time obstetrician in Highland Park, described seeing victims with “wartime” and “unspeakable” injuries, inflicted by an attacker’s high-powered weapon.
“The people who were gone were blown up by that gunfire,” Dr. Baum said, according to CNN. “The horrific scene of some of those bodies is unspeakable for the average person.
“Having been a physician, I’ve seen things in ERs, you know, you do see lots of blood. But the bodies were literally — some of the bodies — there was an evisceration injury from the power of this gun and the bullets.
“There was another person who had an unspeakable head injury. Unspeakable,” he told CNN.
The issue of motive has come up, of course, but everyone from the judge on down said it’s not known. The killer has a “fascination,” folks say, with the number 47, and indeed “47” is tattooed prominently on his right temple for all to see. There might be a clue there, but speculation was vague at the time of the massacre, and nobody, apparently, raised the issue of a connection to the MAGA desire for a second term.
And yet, this is something that should be dealt with head on. Rep. Steve Scalise, now the House Majority Leader, was the most seriously wounded of the four shot at a Republican baseball practice ahead of the annual Congressional game in 2017. He was upset, rightly, that the attack was initially classified by the FBI as a “suicide by cop,” when, in fact, the shooter had a list of Republicans he wanted to kill.
James Hodgkinson, 66, who was killed at the scene, is now referred to as a left-wing extremist with a record of domestic violence. Virginia Attorney General Mike Herring, a Democrat, concluded that Hodgkinson was "fueled by rage against Republican legislators" and that the shooting was "an act of terrorism.”
New York Times opinion writer David French discussed the issue of ideological motivation in assassinations in his June 19 essay, “The Problem of the Christian Assassin.”
He began, “On Saturday morning, Americans woke up to horrifying news. According to a federal criminal complaint, a man named Vance Boelter had stalked four Minnesota lawmakers and then attacked two of them — State Senator John Hoffman and State Representative Melissa Hortman — killing Hortman and her husband and wounding Hoffman and his wife.”
French, who is himself a church-going Christian, described Boelter, the man in custody, as a “person deeply connected to one of America’s most radical religious movements.”
On the Conversation website, Arthur Jipson of the University of Dayton, who was for 11 years the Director of the Criminal Justice Studies Program, wrote that the “lone gunman” idea may offer a “comforting explanation, but it’s dangerously simplistic.”
Jipson said, in the aftermath of Minnesota, “It obscures the conditions that made the violence possible in the first place. It casts the perpetrator as an isolated anomaly – mentally unwell, unpredictable, detached from broader movements or ideologies.”
The myth of the lone gunman, he commented, “continues to serve as a shield against systemic scrutiny.”
One might reasonably suggest that this seems to have been a factor in the case of the Highland Park massacre. Bobby Crimo’s presence at Trump election events on Sept. 7, Sept. 24 or 25 and Nov. 2, 2020, and a "Stop the Steal" demo on Dec. 7, his pro-NRA views, a run-in with a Black Lives Matters member and racist posts, apparently by him, demeaning Jews, Blacks and Asians, were all reported in the aftermath of the attack, but are not referred to now.
He fired on a parade at which the probability that he’d kill Jewish people was high, and indeed several of victims were Jewish, including Irina McCarthy, who was born in Russia. Her 2 ½-year-old son, Aiden McCarthy, who survived unscathed, was Jewish also. The child’s late father, Kevin McCarthy, who shielded him, was Irish American. Kevin’s mother Margo McCarthy, who helped with childcare, was treated for wounds at the scene
Irina McCarthy’s father Michael Levberg, said of his son-in-law, “He had Aiden under his body when he was shot."
When he picked up his grandson at the Highland Park police station, Levberg said Aiden told him, “Mommy and Daddy are coming soon.”
Levberg added that Irina McCarthy, an only child, “was the love of my life.” Her father said, “She was everything.”
