Hands Dripping Blood

Philadelphia's Mayor Richardson Dilworth was crying as he groped for a phrase that could crystallize an emotion. "It is a horrible thing," he sobbed finally, to 50 mourners at the lamplit coffin in a small West Philadelphia funeral home, "that this could happen in our city." The mayor's tears said it better. In the coffin lay the patched body of 26-year-old In Ho Oh, onetime interpreter for U.S. troops in Korea, onetime honor student at Seoul's National University and currently enrolled as a University of Pennsylvania political science exchange student. An eleven-member teen-aged Negro gang had pummeled In Ho Oh to death with a blackjack, a lead pipe and hard-toed shoes, while looking for the admission price of a 35-c- neighborhood dance.

The street-shadows assault was even more brutal because it was luck-of-the-draw. As police put the thing together, the gang decided to roll a passer-by for money. In Ho Oh, in shirtsleeves, had slipped out of his uncle's apartment close by the Penn campus to mail a letter a block away, was attacked as he was doubling back. Two boys shackled the Korean's arms, others knocked off his glasses, hammered him to the ground, dragged his body behind a parked automobile and frisked pockets and socks for money that wasn't there. When police reached Oh, his face had been chopped to unrecognizable pulp. He died ten minutes later.

Within 42 hours, police, swarming into the integrated area around the Penn campus, collared all eleven of the junior-grade thugs, aged 15 to 19. In municipal court a pursed-lipped judge quickly ruled they must be tried for murder as adults. Philadelphia, its brotherly love strained like many another U.S. city's by the mounting onslaught of teen-age warfare (TIME, April 7), was patently disgusted with sociological explanations, was angry enough for a hard approach to juvenile delinquency. Urged the Philadelphia Bulletin: "A soft policy toward the owners of hands dripping with blood is a frightful mistake."

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