Ash Kelley

In a matter of months...

This story had been changed.

They had taken a tragic story of a brutal murder in Queens and made it into an alarmist statement of the decline of urban society.

And she got totally lost.

Yeah.

In his autobiography, Rosenthal Road of Kitty, her name, once known only to her family and the people she served at the bar, has taken on an instantly understood meaning to all who have heard it.

It's like this all just fit their worldview.

Man, oh man.

It didn't matter if it was true or not.

This fit the worldview that they had of what was going on.

And so people, they just accepted it.

And anyone else who had that worldview also accepted this as like, yep, confirmation of what I've been saying.

That's just a fucking crazy thing to write down.

And for anyone else, they simply just accepted what they heard in passing.

Life in the city had become so hard and so bad that people were even afraid, too afraid to intervene to save the life of a young woman being attacked in front of them on the street.

That was the message.

For decades, that was the story of Kitty Genovese.

Not one of a young woman cut down in the prime of her fucking life, but one of urban apathy and cowardice.

And it would remain that way until someone...

finally decided to ask some more probing questions and say, wait a minute, how could this have possibly happened?