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It all happened in less than five seconds.

If reporters and police officials are to be trusted, the fatal attack was random.

Last Monday afternoon outside a Giant Eagle supermarket in North Olmsted, Ohio that had been the scene of a murder-suicide late last June, a portly woman dressed in all-black clothing stabbed 38-year-old Margot Wood and her three-year-old son Julian. The woman calmly walked away, still holding the knife, and was apprehended by police without resisting. Margot and Julian Wood were taken to the University of Ohio St. John Medical Center. Ms. Wood was treated for non-life-threatening injuries to her shoulder, but Julian died from stab wounds to his face and back.

The headline in the Daily Mail reads (emphasis mine here, and thereafter):

Ohio boy, 3, is stabbed to death in horrific random attack outside Giant Eagle supermarket when woman ran at him and his mother in parking lot

Another news story calls it a “Random Attack,” adding:

The randomness and brutality of the attack have left the community in shock and sorrow.

North Olmsted, Ohio is a Cleveland suburb that as of 2020 was 86.1% white and only 3.1% black. At a press conference on Tuesday, North Olmsted Police Detective Sergeant Matt Beck told reporters:

Yesterday afternoon . . . our dispatch center got inundated with several 911 calls reporting [that a female] had just stabbed several people in the Giant Eagle parking lot which is located right across the street from our police station. . . . The female was located still carrying the knife that she had used during this incident. . . . The officers on-scene also tended to the two victims, a three-year-old male and then his mother, 38, both of North Olmstead. Our officers did an amazing job doing life support, life-saving measures on both the three-year-old male and the adult. Unfortunately, as we know, the young child passed away yesterday.

When a reporter asked about the motive behind the attack, Beck said:

As of this point, in speaking with the mother and our knowledge that, no, there was no connection between these two whatsoever. This was entirely a random act of violence.

Beck said that the woman — a five-foot-six, 250-pounder named Bionca Ellis — had either bought or stolen “a butcher knife or some type of kitchen knife” at an adjacent Volunteers of America thrift store. She saw Wood and her son leaving the Giant Eagle supermarket and then followed them toward their car. As Ms. Wood was loading groceries into her trunk, the kid was stabbed in the face and the back. Ms. Wood was stabbed once in the shoulder, leaving groceries strewn around the parking lot. Beck said it all happened in less than five seconds.

Bionca Ellis hails from nearby Cleveland, which as of 2020 was 47.5% black and 32.1% white. Prior to her arrest for the stabbing, Ellis had a few arrests for minor, non-violent crimes such as theft and trespassing.

Julian’s aunt has set up GoFundMe account which as of this writing has collected $182,000. It reads, in part:

Many of you have been following this horrendous story online and have been asking what happened and how something like this could happen in our own neighborhood . . . honestly we have no explanation as to how or why this happened . . . it was a random act of violence. There was no prior altercation, they did not know each other . . . this was a malicious random act. She has devastated our family beyond words . . . she took something from us we can never get back.

Horrendous, indeed. Here are some more ghastly examples of adults killing three-year-old children:

In 2022, 42-year-old Randolph Mack of Essex, Maryland was arrested and charged with the murder of three-year-old Maria Barlow. Mack had “allegedly taken the young girl into a bathroom to talk to her about wetting her pants when things turned physical.” According to a local news report, “Court records suggest Barlow had suffered damage to internal organs, a fractured rib and possible strangulation.” The girl’s aunt, who appears to have been dating Mack, waited several hours before calling 911. She allegedly tried to spare her beau by blaming the death on the girl’s nine-year-old brother.

In 2021, two obese foster parents were arrested and charged with beating their three-year-old adopted daughter Victoria Rose Smith to death in Simpsonville, North Carolina. Prior to the little girl’s death, the foster parents had “attacked white privilege and boasted on social media of their commitment to tackling racism.” The victim’s great aunt told a reporter:

People are bringing the race issue into this, but we don’t have any evidence that it played a part. Evil is evil. Evil doesn’t have a color. . . . This could have happened in a bad white home or they could have been placed in a loving black home where none of this would have happened.

Last year in Lexington, Kentucky, a male babysitter named Andrew Buster was sentenced to 40 years in prison on charges of sodomizing three-year-old Lillyann Grace Reck while the girl’s mother was at work. The girl died as a direct result of being sexually assaulted. Buster escaped the death penalty because it was determined he had a “mental disability.”

In Shelby, North Carolina in 2016, a three-year-old boy named Liam Murray was caught in the crossfire and killed during a shootout between his mother’s drug-dealing acquaintances.

In Canton, Ohio in 2016, three-year-old Owen Buggey was beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend, whom witnesses said “punched and whipped the toddler with a belt and made him stand in the corner of a room for hours at a time.”

In Johnson City, New York in 2015, three-year-old Michael Maxwell was burned to death along with his four-year-old brother in an arson fire set by Dwight Burton, an acquaintance of Maxwell’s mother’s boyfriend.

In Indianapolis in 2014, three-year-old Amabel Calderon was beaten to death and left with bruises and bite marks on her arms and legs by Freddie Bailey, her mother’s boyfriend.

In Racine, Wisconsin in 2013, Marcus Johnson was sentenced to 40 years in prison after killing three-year-old Hunter Wise — the daughter of Johnson’s girlfriend — by punching, whipping, burning, and dunking her in a tub of scalding-hot water.

In Springfield Township, Ohio in 1982, three-year-old Jason Evers died after being kidnapped and suffocated to death by a man named Adrian Williams.

Random?

The only thing that all of these slayings have in common with the recent stabbing death of Julian Wood is that the murderers were all black adults and the three-year-old victims were all white.

What are the odds?