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- <text id=91TT0669>
- <title>
- Apr. 01, 1991: American Notes:Crime
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Apr. 01, 1991 Law And Disorder
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NATION, Page 31
- American Notes
- CRIME
- Death on the Home Front
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Americans got a reminder last week that some war zones are
- more lethal than others. After seven months in the Persian Gulf
- with a Patriot missile battery, Army Specialist Anthony Riggs,
- 22, won a two-week furlough. Back home less than 24 hours,
- Riggs was helping his wife load a car and rented van to move
- out of a crack-infested neighborhood in northeast Detroit to
- an apartment in the safer suburbs. Someone took a fancy to
- Riggs' 1989 Nissan Sentra, pumped five shots into the soldier
- and sped off in the car.
- </p>
- <p> Riggs had underestimated just how murderous America's urban
- battlegrounds could be: "I just got back from where they were
- firing missiles at my head," he said on his return to Detroit's
- mean streets, where gunfire is all too common. "Those bullets
- aren't going to frighten me now." A few hours after he died,
- a letter from Riggs arrived, dated Feb. 22. "I have no
- intentions on becoming one of this war's casualties," he wrote.
- But he was talking about the wrong war.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
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