In the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx, there once was a Public Intermediate School that, sadly, was shut down because of poor performance.  The school was officially called I.S. 192, but it was also known as the Piagentini-Jones School.  That name was in honor of two NYPD patrolmen who were gunned down in May 1971.

Waverly Jones was 33; his partner, Joseph Piagentini, was 28.  Each had been on the job for five years.  They were on foot patrol in a Harlem public housing project when, at about 10 P.M., three assailants ambushed them.  They shot Jones in the back of the head, killing him instantly.  He left behind a wife and three children.  They shot Piagentini 13 times.  He died on the way to the hospital, leaving behind a wife and two children.

It was a political assassination, carried out by members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), who had declared themselves to be in open "rebellion against a system" that had "cruelly oppressed them as a minority." It didn't matter to them that Patrolman Jones was also Black.

Image: Public domain.

One of those convicted for the murders, Anthony Bottom, admitted lying in wait for the officers and committing "cold-blooded murder," adding, "It could have been any officers."

The killers removed Jones's service weapon from his body.  It was later recovered in San Francisco after BLA members opened fire on a police officer there.  According to the FBI, the BLA was responsible for the murders of more than a dozen police officers around the country.

But that's old news.

Now comes word, via the Daily Caller, that Bottom, who now calls himself "Jalil Muntaqim" and who was paroled in 2020 (thanks to former governor Andrew Cuomo's and state lawmakers' alterations to parole guidelines), has been invited to appear at the State University of New York's Brockport campus in April.  The convicted cop-killer will speak on the "History of Black Resistance, U.S. Political Prisoners & Genocide."

If you're surprised, shocked, or even outraged that a convicted cop-killer would be invited to be the guest speaker at an institute of higher learning, you may feel those emotions even more strongly when you learned that these invitations are hardly unprecedented.  The example that comes to my mind is one I wrote about in American Thinker in 2014, when Wesley Cook, who now goes by the more politically trendy "Mumia Abu-Jamal," was selected to give the commencement address at Vermont's Goddard College.

Abu-Jamal, whose death sentence was dismissed in 2011, is still serving a life sentence for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner, who was 25 years old, was married, and had been with the Philadelphia Police Department for five years.

Image: Public domain.

Faulkner's murder started when he stopped a wrong-way driver.  Thus, he wasn't killed in an ambush, unlike Piagentini and Jones, but Cook most certainly executed him.  Having shot Faulkner in the back while Faulkner struggled with Cook's brother, Cook then shot Faulkner in the face at close range as the officer lay wounded on the ground.

But wait, there's more!  Wikipedia identifies Cook (AKA Abu-Jamal) as an "activist and journalist."  Abu-Jamal has written several books while incarcerated and has been the commencement speaker at Olympia Washington's Evergreen College in 1999 and at Ohio's Antioch College in 2000.

In both cases, then and now, in which college students and faculty members fêted and fawned over convicted cop-killers, the slain police officers were (as the late Rush Limbaugh would say) unavailable for comment.

Stu Tarlowe has, since 2010, contributed well over 150 pieces to American Thinker.  His personal pantheon of heroes and role models includes Barry Farber, Jean Shepherd, Long John Nebel, Aristide Bruant, Col. Jeff Cooper, Rabbi Meir Kahane and G. Gordon Liddy.  He was employed as a staff writer for the online magazine of a think-tank forecasting political and societal trends, but when he had to be hospitalized for COVID, he was replaced.  Having recovered, he now writes on a variety of topics (political and personal) in his newsletter at https://stutarlowe.substack.com.