Earlier, 2010: A Reader Wonders If It's An Immigrant Behind The Politically Incorrect Mask
One explanation sometimes offered for the large racial disparity in crime rates is that whites must be dressing up in hyper-realistic black masks and committing crimes.
This sounds ridiculous, but it has actually happened at least once.
A Polish immigrant named Conrad Zdzierak was convicted in 2010 in Ohio of a half dozen robberies he committed while wearing a realistic George Floyd-looking silicone mask.
From WCPO:
By: Tanya O’Rourke Posted at 12:23 AM, Feb 20, 2016
CINCINNATI — When a serial bank robber struck in March and April 2010, surveillance images had many people convinced they knew the culprit.
Several tips came into Crimestoppers; all pointed to the same person, who was a bald black man.
“And when detectives went to that particular house, knocked on the door, and his mom answered it, and she said, ‘I know why you’re here. I just saw on television my son robbing a bank,'” Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said.
Police took that man into custody; his name wasn’t given to WCPO. But not long afterward, they got a call from a woman who said her boyfriend robbed the banks.
His name was Conrad Zdzierak, and he was white.
Police say Zdzierak wore a realistic mask that made him seem to be a bald black man. “He had bought a theatrical mask from Beverly Hills, which cost a few thousand dollars, and it’s very lifelike, as you know, and he had it on,” Deters said. “And it looks like the guy they called Crimestoppers about.”
After his arrest, police found dozens of notes on Zdzierak’s computer between him and a mask company, along with notes about what went wrong during the robberies and how he could improve by doing things like drinking less coffee because it made him tense.
The obsessives at Wikipedia have a list of a half-dozen crimes committed while wearing silicone masks.
