A 28-year-old Modesto man is dead after a trip to a Costco parking lot in Camarillo, and a 35-year-old rabbi from Agoura Hills sits in a Ventura County jail cell on a murder charge — another data point in the slow unraveling of basic safety in American public life.
Nicholas Lang was struck by a vehicle near the gas pumps of the newly opened Costco on the evening of Oct. 20, according to the Ventura County Sheriff's Office. He was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The medical examiner hasn't formally determined the cause of death, and the sheriff's office is withholding details about what led to the alleged altercation. What we know is this: Abba Bryski was arrested at the scene, and the Superior Court of California's website shows he now faces felony charges for murder and use of a deadly weapon, plus a misdemeanor count of resisting or obstructing a peace officer. He's being held on $3 million bail, according to the California Post.
That's the bare factual skeleton. The flesh on the bones is what should worry every working American who just wants to buy groceries without ending up on a slab.
SFGATE framed this as a local crime story, burying the lede by pivoting to a separate fatal pedestrian incident near a San Francisco Costco last year — as if one dead citizen per Costco is just the cost of doing business in modern California. The outlet noted that the earlier driver "remained on scene and complied with officers," as though the bar for acceptable public behavior is now simply not fleeing after you kill someone.
Meanwhile, in the nation's capital region, a driver wanted on an assault with a deadly weapon warrant led U.S. Park Police on a chase from D.C. into Prince George's County Monday night, crashing into an innocent motorist along the way, WJLA reported. That driver was hospitalized and arrested. The suspect's identity hasn't been released. An innocent person going about their business was hospitalized because someone with an active warrant for a violent crime was free to drive the streets.
These aren't isolated incidents. They're symptoms. A rabbi allegedly kills a man in a Costco parking lot. A wanted suspect barrels through two jurisdictions before crashing. In neither case did the system prevent the harm — it only showed up after the body count to process paperwork.
The social contract is straightforward: citizens surrender a measure of liberty in exchange for the state keeping order. When the state can't or won't do that — when prosecutors decline to charge, when judges release violent offenders, when policing is treated as the problem rather than the solution — the contract is void. Nicholas Lang didn't volunteer to be the cost of someone else's second chance.
Bryski will have his day in court. The question is how many more Americans will have their day in the morgue before the people in charge admit their experiment has failed.
