A disturbing story out of Riverside, California may hold some lessons for activists who are still pushing the “empty the jails” narrative in cities around the country. Ke Chieh Mang, a 64-year-old woman of Asian descent, was out walking her dogs last weekend when she passed a young woman who appeared to be homeless. Before she knew what was happening, 23-year-old Darlene Montoya allegedly spun around, produced a knife and stabbed her without warning. Mang was rushed to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead. At first glance, it might be easy to assume that this was another in a recent spate of anti-Asian hate crimes, but there was more to the story than meets the eye. (Fox News)

An Asian woman was fatally stabbed while walking her dogs in California in what cops are calling a random attack.

Ke Chieh Meng, 64, was out with her two small pups in Riverside around 7:30 a.m. Saturday when she was stabbed and left on the ground bleeding, KTLA-TV reported…

Meng’s suspected attacker, Darlene Stephanie Montoya, 23, was identified by police as a transient. She was arrested near the scene and charged in what police described as a “completely random” attack.

Further investigation by the police produced an initial conclusion that this was not, in fact, an anti-Asian hate crime and there was no racist motivation. The reason they were able to determine this was that Montoya had been charged with assault with a deadly weapon in another incident barely a month earlier. The victim in that attack, another woman, was white. Also, Montoya had a history of mental disorders and was pumped up on a controlled substance during the most recent attack. Both attacks were classified by the police as “random.”

The next question that should occur to any reasonable person is an obvious one. If this maniac had already tried to randomly kill someone weeks before Ke Chieh Mang’s death and was known to be a disturbed drug addict, what was she doing out on the streets? Following the previous attack, Montoya had been charged but was released without bail “due to COVID-19 restrictions.”

We’ve seen similar stories out of Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, among other places. Liberal prosecutors and district attorneys have been elected to office on a promise to “empty the jails” and put an end to our “incarceration nation.” Particularly in Philadelphia, they have latched on to the pandemic as a rationale for saying that most suspects can’t be safely kept in jail cells for fear of a COVID outbreak. Between that and the liberal fetishism over ending cash bail, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the courts to lock up anyone and many jails have effectively had revolving doors installed in them.

But where do you draw the line in these efforts? In the case we’re examining today, the suspect in question wasn’t a “potential danger” to others or herself. She’d already attacked a complete stranger and tried to kill her. She had a history of violence and mental illness, along with drug addiction. How many more red flags do you need before realizing that a person simply can’t be sprung back into the wild and trusted to behave themselves?

Ke Chieh Meng is dead. There’s no reason for her to be gone from this world. If you want to get out in the streets and start demanding “Justice For” (fill in the blank), perhaps you could focus your efforts on ensuring that law enforcement is allowed to work as designed and not be handicapped by all of this liberal sloganeering. Then maybe you might find a way to deliver “justice” for Ke Chieh Meng, or at least do something positive in her memory.