The Stabbing at the Basilica, by George Neumayr

“Monsignor Walter Rossi has a lot to answer for,” said Keith Green, a former security guard at the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. Referring to Tuesday’s stabbing at the Shrine where Rossi is rector — police called the violence the result of a “domestic” squabble between Dorsey Lee Mack and a Shrine security guard whom he hit with his car before slashing another guard who tried to intervene — Green said, “It doesn’t surprise me. This is the culmination of Rossi’s unprofessional hiring practices. He hires guards from high-crime neighborhoods, many of whom have arrest records themselves, and they bring problems from those neighborhoods with them to work. That is why this happened.”

Green resigned from the Shrine in July after he was attacked by Ishmael Henley, one of Rossi’s security supervisors who is awaiting trial for assaulting his ex-wife and endangering his child. “I learned later that Henley had been released on bail from jail four days before our fight,” Green said. “The fight started after I complained to Henley that he wasn’t doing his job. Shrine management, of course, sided with him in the dispute, which made it impossible for me to continue working there as a guard.

“Rossi hires common hoodlums from some of the most crime-ridden parts of D.C. and Maryland,” Green said, “and their problems spill over into the shrine. There was an atmosphere at it rife for conflict. I would see guards trying to start fights with rumors, guards who would get drunk at Shrine parties and blast their pornographic rap in the security office. And many of them smoked weed. ….