inalienable right of pizza delivery, The

Human Events, Jun 16, 2000 by Jeffrey, Terence P

George Antoine Withers was a mere lad of 16 when he helped slice up a Domino's pizza man-so a D.C. judge cut him a break.

One night in 1995, Withers and his pal Alonzo Robinson were feeling a little frisky. So they decided to rob a local working stiff. What easier target than a Domino's deliveryman?

Shortly after 9:00 p.m. they called a local Domino's and ordered a pizza delivered to their hangout in Northeast Washington. When deliveryman Jerome Mitchell-also of Northeast Washington-approached the door, Robinson and Withers jumped him, and, as Withers later alleged to the court, Robinson ( the "codefendant") jabbed Mitchell in the face with a knife.

Mitchell was blinded in one eye. Four years later, a D.C. Superior Court judge sentenced Withers (who admitted his role in the attack) under the District's Youth Act. He fined him $5,000 and ordered him to serve not more than eight years in prison. The fate of "codefendant" Robinson, the alleged knifeman, was never reported in local newspapers.

In a metropolitan area where murder is commonplace, and where the murder of a pizza deliveryman is not unusual, the blinding of Mitchell and the meager punishment meted out to Withers was not big news. It merited one story: the third item on a brief police blotter on page B-8 of a Wednesday edition of the Washington Post.

(And it elicited no calls in Congress for new knife-control legislation.)

Domino's deliveryman Carl A. Krogmann, on the otherhand, made page B-1. He died doing it, however, and even then he did not make the headline. The banner over the April 9, 1990, Washington Post story that reported Krogmann's death-by-- pizza-delivery read: "Seven People Killed in Bloody Weekend; District, Md. Log Shootings, SwordDeath." Krogmann was just another of the six fatal shootings.

He had taken a call to deliver a pizza to a house in Prince George's County, just over the District line in Maryland. The address was five blocks from the shop. He put the pie in the car, drove down the road, got out, and walked to the door. An 18-yearold boy opened it, and his 16-year-old partner promptly shot Krogmann with a .22-caliber pistol.

Mitchell no doubt knew he had a dangerous job before he lost his eye. Just the year before, two pizza deliverymen had been murdered within weeks of each other in the same part of our Nation's Capital. "Both pizza drivers were killed in Northeast Washington," reported the Post.

"They are some of the easiest targets," explained Metropolitan Police Lt. Michael Smith. "They usually travel lone. They travel at night. They drive where they're told, when they're told. You look at how bad some of these areas are, I don't know how they do it "

Not surprisingly, some local residents, and the Clinton Justice Department, thought they saw a civil-rights crisis. After all, many of the people who deliver pizzas in

Washington are ethnic minorities or immigrants. They work long hours, for small wages, at high risk to life and limb. But wait a minute-in the view of the Justice

Department, and a few local residents, the pizza deliverymen were not victims. They were culprits. They were interfering in the right

of Washingtonians to have hot pizza delivered directly to their door.

It seems that after the spate of murders and attacks, a few Washington-area Domino's outlets instructed their drivers to deliver pizzas in certain neighborhoods only if the person who ordered the pizza was willing to come out to the street and retrieve the pie from the driver at his car. A few notorious addresses were removed from the delivery list entirely.

Four aggrieved Washingtonians sued Domino's in federal court, alleging racial discrimination. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, led by never-confirmed assistant Atty. Gen. Bill Lan Lee, began separate negotiations with the Domino's hierarchy.

Last week Domino's cut a deal with Justice, sealing an out-of court agreement promising to strictly monitor the areas in which it limits pizza delivery to ensure that only the density of crime, and not the density of any ethnic population, is factored into the decision.

But the federal lawsuit continues. A month ago, Federal District Judge Paul L. Friedman refused to throw it out, declaring, "The notion that people-just because they live in different parts of the city-an't get the same sort of service that I could get in Georgetown, that's not right."

So America now awaits a decision on whether door-todoor pizza delivery is an inalienable right-even when it costs someone their life.