From 2010 to 2016, ABA-accredited law schools lost how many full-time faculty positions?
Hint: Law school faculties grew 40 percent from 1998 to 2008, but in order to cut costs following the recession, lots of full-time faculty positions were on the chopping block.
See the answer on the next page.
Just a little more than a year after a venture capital firm brought it out of stealth mode, a biotech startup focused on oncology drugs that target mutations outside of those traditionally targeted by therapies currently on the market is filing to go public.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Black Diamond Therapeutics filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday for a $100 million initial public offering. The company would trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol BDTX.
Black Diamond did not respond to a request for comment.
Black Diamond’s most recent venture capital fund raise happened last month, when it closed an $85 million Series C financing round, led by Boxer Capital of the Tavistock Group. In addition to existing investors Versant Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, RA Capital Management, Nextech Invest, Invus, Perceptive Advisors, City Hill Ventures and Roche Venture Fund, new investors included Wellington Management Company, BVF Partners, Deerfield Management and funds managed by Janus Henderson Investors, Casdin Capital and Logos Capital.
The company emerged from stealth mode at San Francisco-based Versant in December 2018, having been launched out of Versant’s Basel, Switzerland-based discovery division, Ridgeline. Black Diamond’s focus is on drugs targeting allosteric mutant oncogenes, in contrast with the kinase domain mutations that are targeted by most small-molecule drugs.
Black Diamond’s pipeline page states that it plans to start a Phase I/II study of its lead product candidate, BDTX-189, in the first half of this year. ClinicalTrials.gov lists the trial, called MasterKey-01, as having opened on Dec. 19 and states that it is currently recruiting patients with advanced solid tumors who have mutations or alterations in the HER2 or EGFR genes, with a target enrollment of 184 participants, at sites in Florida and Tennessee.
The company presented preclinical data at the European Society for Medical Oncology’s annual meeting in September showing that BDTX-189 was able to inhibit a broad range of EGFR and HER2 mutations.
The company’s other drug candidate is undisclosed, but is designed to target EGFR in patients with the brain cancer glioblastoma, a disease that has seen little in the way of improvements in therapy. Black Diamond’s pipeline page lists the drug as being in the optimization stage of development, with plans this year to initiate preclinical studies that would enable it to apply for Food and Drug Administration approval to open clinical trials.
Photo: jxfzsy, Getty Images
Ric Ocasek Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
As anticipated, Paulina Porizkov, wife of Cars rocker, Ric Ocasek has filed a Right of Election claim against the deceased’s estate in New York County Surrogate’s Court. Porizkov and Ocasek were married for 30 years, but allegedly separated when she discovered him dead, in his Manhattan home on September 15, 2019.
Ocasek’s purported Last Will and Testament is dated August 28, 2019 and it leaves no provision for Porizkov or two sons, Christopher and Adam from his marriage to Constance Campbell. Ocaseks other children including Porzikov’s sons are included in the Last Will. Although the Last Will recognizes that Porizkov and the testator were not legally divorced at the writing of the Last Will, it states that she is not left anything and that should Ocasek die before a divorce is finalized, his wife would not be not entitled the elective share. He alleges that she abandoned him.
Probate laws vary from state to state. The theory of a spousal Right of Election is that a disinherited spouse can make a claim, usually to the fiduciary of the decedent’s estate, as to for the statutorily defined amount for which the spouse is entitled. For example, in the State of New York, the surviving spouse may receive the greater of $50,000 or one-third (1/3) of the deceased spouse’s net estate. This means that even if you hate your spouse, have not spoken to your spouse, or your last will gives all of your asset to your children or charities, your spouse can take a share. The share is not limited to what passes through probate. When calculating the elective share the law takes into account all assets including life insurance policies, annuities, real properties and other financial interests regardless of their titling. A defense to the elective share is abandonment, that is that the spouse left the decedent and is therefore not entitled to her share. Sometimes in this kind of proceeding, a surviving spouse must prove that she was actually married to the decedent. At times an estate executor will reject the right of election claim alleging that the right to elect against the estate had been waived in a previously executed legal document.
Ocasek’s Last Will and Testament leaves provisions for the children he and Porizkov share together. Besides wanting to provide for one’s children, this planning technique places the surviving parent against her children. If the slighted spouse elects against the Estate and succeeds, her share will be paid from her the other beneficiary’s, including her own children’s cut. The children will see less than what the testator intended for them, not to mention the significant legal fees that the Estate will incur as a result of litigating the matter. At times, this may act as a deterrent so that the spouse does not elect. Other times, it fuels the fire.
Ocasek had six children, two from each of his three marriages. It has been reported that the disinherited sons are investigating the Last Will and Testament and gathering information with regard to the Estate. Many times beneficiaries are left assets outside of probate, for example an account left in trust or a life insurance policy. Other times, a disinherited beneficiary may look into the validity of the last will and testament. Upon one’s passing, despite the substance of the last will and testament, the decedent’s next-of-kin will be notified so that they may have the opportunity to inquire and ultimately object to the last will. Objections may include testamentary capacity, undue influence, the due execution of the last will and testament and an allegation that the last will was procured under fraud. In order to decide whether or not to file an objection to a last will and testament, depending on the state, one may depose witnesses and the attorney draftsperson, review medical documents and other documents related to the decedent.
Although Ocasek has only been deceased for a few months, his Estate is ripe for litigation on multiple fronts. In instances where there are children from different families, estrangement, divorce, separation and of course, fame, it is imperative be thoughtful when executing an estate plan. Writing one’s last will should be the impetus to tie up any loose ends and to concretize the status of familial relationships so that the matter does not erupt upon one’s passing. In will and right of election proceedings, the main witness, the one with all of the answers, cannot be questioned. This silence is perhaps more disheartening than any inequity in the disposition of assets.
Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com.
There was much in Xerox’s unsolicited and very much unwanted offer to buy HP for the latter to be skeptical about. The wisdom of a tie-up, Carl Icahn’s thirst for one notwithstanding, to begin with. But before getting to the whether, when and by what means these two companies should get hitched, or even the more fundamental question of why HP would want anything to do with a failing enterprise like Xerox, HP was skeptical of a $33.5 billion offer from a company worth $8 billion. With what one can only imagine was a paternalistic eye-roll and a somewhat dismissive, “Show me the money and then we’ll talk,” HP walked away.
Well, HP: Xerox has something to show you.
Citigroup Inc., Mizuho Financial Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. have agreed to back Xerox by lending up to $24 billion, the company said in a public letter from Xerox Chief Executive John Visentin to HP’s board…. The new commitments represent a vote of confidence by major financial institutions in the logic of the deal and the combined company’s ability to generate adequate cash flow. It also underscores Xerox’s desire to be the buyer in a potential combination, according to people familiar with the matter, after some analysts have suggested it could be hoping for HP to buy it.
Which is all a long way of saying: This is about to get good.
Should HP continue to be unreceptive, it is conceivable that Mr. Icahn or Xerox would launch a proxy fight at HP in the coming weeks.
(Image via Getty)
It’s hard to believe, but U.S. News & World Report used to be a publication that delivered domestic news and a world report. But almost no one remembers USNWR for that role. For most people, the only time the USNWR even crosses their mind is when they’re scanning the latest rankings release of the best colleges, business schools, med schools, or, obviously, law schools. The percentage of Americans who believe the “R” in USNWR stands for “rankings” is certainly non-zero and probably enough to keep them in the Democratic primary until at least Super Tuesday.
The rankings game is so essential to the USNWR business model that they’ve started throwing rankings on everything, knowing that the public has a bottomless appetite for their proto-listicles. They started breaking down schools by specialties to give folks more numbers, even if they provided a prospective student with dubious informative value. They’re ranking law schools by “Legal Writing” programs! It’s a subject so tangential that most schools don’t even grade it! Imagine some 0L choosing a school to be the best Bluebooking unemployed attorney in America.
Alas, the current specialties aren’t enough and USNWR wants to rank even more subjects:
On the one hand, these more accurately track the areas of law graduates end up in than ranking “International Law.” On the other hand, ranking 1L courses as specialties may finally have crossed the line into the absurd.
Professor Orin Kerr of UC Berkeley certainly thinks this has gone too far. After noting that USNWR creates its existing specialty rankings by asking professors in that area to rank programs at other institutions on a 5 point scale, Kerr explains that he would have no clue how to meaningfully rank Criminal Law programs:
Going after core subjects may have heightened the lunacy, but the ranking never had a great way of gauging which schools provide the best, say, “Dispute Resolution” education based on a 54 percent response rate from professors starfucking their conference hall idols from afar.
Law schools are not the same as undergrad. Finding the best architecture program for a budding Frank Lloyd Wright isn’t the same as finding the right Crim program for a budding Jerry Callow or Jerry Gallo. Law school isn’t really teaching the practice these days anyway. Maybe they should be, but until that shift happens, go to the school offering the most well-rounded legal education and wait for future employers to explain the subtleties of ERISA. Ranking schools by practice area just muddies the waters for students — especially those students who are the first in their family to pursue law. This is the sort of thing that pushes students with no one around to tell them any better to head to a top three “Environmental Law” program when they could go to a T14 school on a scholarship. With no offense to those specialty programs, I promise the T14 school will set the student up with everything they need to build a career in that field.
This exposes one of the long-standing problems with the USNWR rankings: they are so easily gamed. Looking for a quick boost? Jack your acceptance rate. Tighten up on LSAT scores. Hire more adjuncts to artificially improve student to faculty ratio. Hell, the size of the library used to be a big factor in law school rankings. Buy more books… move up a slot. Not to self-promote, but it’s one of the virtues of the Above the Law Top 50 Law School rankings that the only way to game them is to provide better value for students.
Just build a “center” and shoot off a press release. Bring in a flashy speaker. Hire a scholar and tell them they don’t need to actually teach. There are so many ways to mess with this ranking.
Some things just don’t need a number on them. Just stop.
But they won’t. They’re in too deep. USNWR is riding the rankings bubble — the only way to drive revenue is to offer newer, fresher numbers. And then even newer and even fresher numbers. Over and over until every aspect of the law school experience is tagged and catalogued.
Every aspect except the ones that might actually help students make a meaningful decision.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
Elizabeth Wurtzel (photo by me, taken at a party I hosted years ago)
Elizabeth Wurtzel, the celebrated writer who skyrocketed to fame with her 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation, passed away today at a hospital here in Manhattan. As her husband, Jim Freed, told the Washington Post, the immediate cause of death was leptomeningeal disease (cancer spreading to the cerebrospinal fluid); the more long-term cause was breast cancer, which Wurtzel had struggled with over the years. She was 52.
Wurtzel became famous for her writing — Prozac Nation, two other books, numerous magazine and newspaper pieces — but as longtime readers of Above the Law know, she was also a lawyer. She graduated from Yale Law School and worked for a time with David Boies, her mentor in the legal world, at Boies Schiller Flexner.
I got to know Elizabeth through writing about her for ATL. Our coverage of her was not always adoring — for example, we covered her failing the New York bar exam (which she subsequently passed) — but she took it all in stride. To be honest, I think part of her just enjoyed the attention.
At some point over the years, we became friends. Elizabeth had great confidence (critics might call it arrogance), as well as a certain elitist streak, and I think she appreciated the fact that we shared two prestigious alma maters.
I’m embarrassed to admit that we were not in touch at the time of her death (and I had no idea she was sick again). When I last saw her, over dinner at an Italian restaurant near her apartment that she frequented, she was in good health and fine form. She shared with us, as only she could do, the remarkable story about her family that she subsequently turned into a buzz-generating New York Magazine essay.
It’s always difficult to write about a complicated person after their passing — and it’s even more daunting when that person was, like Elizabeth Wurtzel, an acclaimed memoirist. When I learned of her death this morning, I tweeted out a few descriptors — “fiercely intelligent, frequently infuriating, forever inimitable” — but the best authority on Lizzie Wurtzel was, well, herself.
I like how her longtime friend, the writer David Samuels, described her to the New York Times: “Lizzie’s literary genius rests not just in her acres of quotable one-liners, but in her invention of what was really a new form, which has more or less replaced literary fiction — the memoir by a young person no one has ever heard of before. It was a form that Lizzie fashioned in her own image, because she always needed to be both the character and the author.”
And Lizzie often needed to be the center of attention — a quality not uncommon among memoirists, but one that sometimes made her exhausting to hang out with. She was extremely opinionated — and often right, but no less opinionated when not. She didn’t always show the best judgment — again, something she openly admitted in her writing — and found herself in constant scrapes. (David Boies was not just her boss and mentor, but also her frequent white knight; as Elizabeth marveled to me on more than one occasion, he rode to her rescue numerous times over the years, never one to abandon a friend in need.)
As she would be the first to admit, Elizabeth Wurtzel was not a perfect person — but her great qualities lie beyond dispute as well. She was brilliant and beautiful, which was what first made her famous, but she was also, on a more personal level, compassionate and courageous — reflected in how bravely she handled her fight with cancer, which she memorably described as, “like many things that happen to women, mostly a pain in the ass.” She used her public platform and powerful voice to raise awareness about breast cancer and to advocate testing for the BRCA genetic mutation, aka “the breast cancer gene.”
Although she will be most remembered for her writing, Elizabeth Wurtzel exhibited two qualities that we seek from lawyers at their best. First, she had a formidable intellect, including an ability to think outside the proverbial box and challenge conventional wisdom — something she always had, but honed while working for Boies.
Second, and most importantly, she had a strong sense of fairness and a passionate commitment to justice. Few things could get her more exercised in conversation than perceived unfairness or injustice. The case she worked on the most at BSF involved seeking justice for a family whose son was killed by terrorists — terrorists who were, the suit alleged, funded by proceeds laundered through a major bank.
Elizabeth Wurtzel will be missed by many in the legal as well as literary community. Lizzie, rest in peace.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, ‘Prozac Nation’ author who spurred a memoir boom, dies at 52 [Washington Post]
Elizabeth Wurtzel, ‘Prozac Nation’ Author, Is Dead at 52 [New York Times]
David Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer, speaker, and legal recruiter at Lateral Link, where he is a managing director in the New York office. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. David previously worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@laterallink.com.
Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society Board, the man responsible for getting four Supreme Court Justices and hundreds of federal judges confirmed, would have you believe he just this very moment discovered political dark money. Axios reports this morning that Leo will “step aside from the daily running of the Federalist Society to focus on a new venture — inspired by Arabella Advisers on the left — that will funnel big money and expertise across the conservative movement.”
Leonard Leo, who has been payed upwards of $400,000 a year by the Federalist Society, which does not disclose its funders, who shepherded $250 million of dark money to influence judicial selections between 2014 and 2017 through a secretive network of non-profits, which do not disclose their donors, would have you believe that it was only from watching liberals in the 2018 election cycle that Leo realized he was going to have to start getting serious about spending money on judicial confirmations.
Leo told Axios that he and his business partner, conservative communications executive Greg Mueller, studied tax filings that led them to Arabella, a little-known yet powerful consulting firm that advises liberal donors and nonprofits about where to spend their money.
Oh, please. Citizens United v. FEC was decided on a Thursday, but it wasn’t last Thursday. We are ten years into John Roberts’s gift of unlimited money sloshing around politics, which is approximately nine years too late for Axios’s Jonathan Swan to report with wide-eyed credulity that Leo took a peak at what liberals are dong and decided he’d need to spend a “minimum of $10 million issue advocacy campaign focusing on judges in the 2020 cycle” just to keep up with the liberals. These guys spend ten times that every single election cycle.
Leonard Leo didn’t get the idea to start injecting money into politics from a Politico piece on a liberal fundraising network with “stunning reach and influence as part of ‘an unprecedented gusher of secret money’ that ‘boosted Democrats and liberal causes in 2018.’” This guy invented dark money!
Of Leo’s new vehicle, Axios reports, “CRC Advisors will evolve out of Mueller’s existing conservative communications firm, CRC Strategies.” What they fail to mention is that CRC Strategies has been funding conservative political hit pieces since 2004’s Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear against presidential candidate John Kerry.
The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money spent on campaigns, noted just last week that:
A secretive network spending millions of dollars to confirm President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks terminated multiple 501(c)(4) nonprofit nodes last year while funneling money to an even more opaque limited-liability company, further obscuring the network’s funding sources.
At the crux of that network is Leonard Leo, Trump’s top outside judicial adviser and a longtime executive at the Federalist Society who helped shepherd Trump’s Supreme Court picks through the confirmation process. Leo holds leadership positions with multiple groups in the network.
So Leo may have figured out a different conduit for the dark money, one that allows him and Mueller to bill themselves as philanthropic consultants, but it’s the exact same game he’s been playing for a decade. And he’s not being forced into this because of some dark money arms race with Democrats. Arabella Advisors is just the newest bogeyman now that a rash of anti-semitic attacks have made it untenable to hold up George Soros and the Open Society Foundation as the liberal arch villains.
Come on, Axios, do better. Google is free!
Leonard Leo to Shape New Conservative Network [Axios]
Trump judicial adviser’s ‘dark money’ network hides Supreme Court spending [Open Secrets]
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
There is a long and sordid history of faithlessness to the guarantees enumerated in the U.S. Constitution. After all, judicial review did not exist until 1803, and popular will could therefore effectually overrule, or at least incredibly frustrate, any Constitutional guarantee from the start. Yet, common fidelity existed enough to expand Constitutional guarantees to the states, as a direct consequence of a rebellion by some. After civil war, our country’s highest court refused to uphold the newly expanded Constitution, only for some of course, for nearly a century. Today many continue to make a persuasive case to many, that our courts are still failing.
But back to the positive for a moment. Wherever the expansion of Constitutional rights has occurred, with full legal force, it has identifiably resulted in a universally positive impact on American society. Nowhere is that fact more evident than with the expansion of First Amendment religious liberty and moral/social tolerance. Prior to the expansion of the First Amendment to the states, religious minorities were widely discriminated against by state governments. The state-sponsored discrimination was not due to religious minorities being denied the benefits of established state churches, as some have erroneously suggested, but rather by state support of religion at all, even in neutral form. In any case, the fact that states can no longer legally discriminate against religious minorities in the ways done before is a positive development of Constitutional expansion.
Despite the expansion, enforcement of the Constitution today, as it always has before, faces significant hurdles. Court-created immunities for government actors have resulted in a system that leaves citizens, in the words of a federal judge, “violated but not vindicated.” It just so happens, however, that Clark Neily, a Cato Institute scholar, has proposed a novel solution that is generating substantial praise in the field of constitutional law.
Neily’s proposal can be summed up as simply combining “two utterly commonplace features of our existing system: traffic tickets and small claims court.” Imagine, Neily argues, a system where citizens can report constitutional violations as with any small claims court, that can include methods of introducing “any documentation you might have, including a recording of the incident.” The punishment in many cases need only be slight, a minor fine, again as with any traffic court, and made without any admission of liability by the government or its actors. Of course, application of Neily’s proposal would likely mean that only trivial or minor constitutional offenses would stand the chance of being redeemed, and the more serious offenses would be left unaddressed.
Strong evidence exists, however, that gradual, incremental steps in the direction of human rights is a powerful engine for positive change and human flourishing. Rather refreshingly, that evidence is taken into account in Neily’s constitutional small claims court proposal, as is the recognition that harsh punitive responses to violators, even where just, are self-defeating. Instead, Neily argues the system should harness the power of incentive in order to address minor constitutional harms, I’ll let him explain it from here:
“We provide a kind of bonus, equivalent to, say, ten percent of an officer’s current salary, and we put it in escrow at the beginning of the year […] And it is from that escrow account that awards against the officer in constitutional small claims court would be drawn. Thus, good officers who generate few if any meritorious claims in a given year will receive a nice bonus in the form of a substantially fully funded escrow account; but officers who generate lots of meritorious claims will receive little if any bonus and may even have to go into their own pockets if the money in their escrow account runs out before the end of the year.”
Although Neily focuses his proposal on police officers, it could be applied to every government actor. Although the benefits might appear slight, I can attest from experience than even relatively minor or trivial deprivations of Constitutional guarantees can have a profoundly negative impact on citizens and that correcting, or at least acknowledging the violation can be equally profound positive effect.
Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.
I think everyone was in a bit of a funk this AALS. 2019 was hard on everyone. That mostly isn’t the fault of AALS.
For those not in the know, the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting takes place in early January. This year it was in Washington, D.C. Many people I spoke with felt a little off. Hey, look at me, vying to be a TV journalist by using the phrase “some people are saying!”
Maybe it was the hotel. The Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, a place known in the legal academic community as “the meat market hotel,” is a bit run down. The hotel’s two towers brings back memories of having to run back and forth for job interviews, for those enough lucky enough to have had them. I personally passed by the room where my alma mater “interviewed” me as a courtesy before moving on to their serious candidates (my room was three doors down). During a prior stay here, I fixed my toilet, which was running all night. And the picture in my room looked like something from “Stranger Things.” Marriott Marquis next D.C. time, AALS?
Perhaps it is Iran. We were all set — and excited — to talk about impeachment, and now the topic of conversation has pivoted to war powers. As I wrote in a tweet: “I feel a grave disturbance in the force. It is as if a thousand law professors working on impeachment law review articles suddenly shifted to writing about war powers.”
Perhaps it was the whole “why is my professor at a conference drinking and living large while I’m waiting on my damn grades?” feeling. It is a legitimate grievance. I see less schlepping of exams to and from the conference every year, though. By the way, I want to assure students that most professors get how serious grades are. We may joke to relieve tension, but we are serious about them.
A lot of people were not feeling well.
There were discussions about the one-sidedness of some panels. I’m sympathetic to these arguments. I don’t think panels should be cheerleading sections. Nor should it be football, with two opposing sides clashing. The world is more nuanced than binary opposition, something lost in the current political climate. (And even if it were football, who’s the ref?) Regardless, this is something that does need some work, AALS Sections. Then again, if most law professors come from the same schools, can you really do anything about it?
I could focus on all of this as I have in the past, but I am striving to be more positive this year. I want to focus on what I enjoy about AALS. Why I keep going every year, apart from my perpetual drive to annoy the staff with my hijacking of the #AALS2020 hashtag.
Sure, I have in the past pushed that AALS needs to make some changes. And I still believe that, for its own survival, it needs to still change. I nudge because I care. But there are things beyond its control, and things I don’t want to change. The list above are things I like about AALS that I don’t want to change, even if I don’t go to karaoke.
Academia can be, and is often, isolating. And the AALS could be more inclusive, a bit less hierarchical, and less cliquey. That’s what the new year is for: Aspirational goals, right?
See you next year, AALS. I apologize in advance for my tweets.
LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here. He is way funnier on social media, he claims. Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.
Randy Gori
We told you yesterday about the tragic death of attorney Randy Gori, 47. The prominent nationwide asbestos litigation lawyer and philanthropist was found dead on Saturday of an apparent homicide. Now authorities have released more detail about Gori’s death, and they’ve charged a man in connection with the homicide.
Timothy M. Banowetz, 28, was charged yesterday with first-degree murder, armed robbery, vehicle theft and unlawful restraint. Police say Banowetz stabbed Gori, resulting in his death, and unlawfully restrained two unnamed minors. As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the sheriff of Madison County noted the particularly heinous nature of the case:
“In my 22-year career as a law enforcement official, I’ve seen a lot of gruesome cases,” Madison County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Dave Vucich said Monday. “But this one elevates to the top of heinous and senseless crimes.”
Vucich also said the actions of Gori during the attack, and an unnamed woman interrupting the attack, likely saved the lives of the two children. Vucich, who knew Gori personally, said, “I think Randy was a hero in this case.”
While investigators believe the attack was premeditated, the connection between Banowetz and Gori is still unknown, and there’s been no statement about motive for the attack. Police say they believe the suspect acted alone, and that Banowetz lived a “transient” lifestyle.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).