The Death of Patrick Heringer: A Case Study in Institutional Sadism and Bureaucratic Nihilism from Cincinnati, Ohio
The tragedy of Patrick Heringer is not an isolated failure — it is a symptom of institutional decay, where optics take precedence over outcomes, and victims are treated as threats.
There is much said about the rise and fall of nations, about economies and geopolitics, but not enough is said about how civilizations die on the inside first—through their institutions. When systems designed to protect become instruments of cruelty, and when procedure becomes an end in itself, you get something that looks very much like the Cincinnati tristate area. I have written about this previously in the case of Ryan Hinton.
Consider now the case of Patrick Heringer, a 46-year-old Army veteran and gym owner, stabbed to death in his own home in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood on June 4. His wife, Sarah Heringer, watched him bleed out. She called the police. And then the police handcuffed her.
“That is your system at work,” Heringer read to a Local12 reporter from a letter she wrote to city officials. “Traumatize the victims and treat them like suspects while criminals exploit your failure to lead.”
The quote is from The Cincinnati Enquirer, which reported that some news stations were told by police there was no intruder, while others reported seeing a woman—Sarah Heringer—taken out of the house in handcuffs. The immediate institutional impulse, even in the face of horror, was not to serve or protect, but to control, contain, and obscure.
This is what I am calling institutional sadism and bureaucratic nihilism, as it will be used in my forthcoming memoir: the prioritization of control and procedure over meaning, justice, or basic human empathy. It is the inability—or refusal—of the state to distinguish between victims and threats.
The man accused of the murder, Mordecia Black, had been released on probation in January despite a violent criminal history. His presence in Over-the-Rhine, his ability to commit yet another brutal act, and the response of the police tell a story that goes beyond failure. It is systemic unreality in action, another term I plan to use in my memoir: the collapse of logic and coherence within governance.
Sarah Heringer placed the blame where it belongs:
“Your inaction cost a man his life. You didn't just fail me, you failed him and you are failing this city. The time for excuses is over.”
City leaders like Mayor Aftab Pureval issued standard condolences and pointed to statistical improvements:
“Senseless violence... is unacceptable — and it’s our responsibility as City leaders to put a stop to it.”
But the Enquirer itself contradicted the narrative. According to police data:
There have been 778 violent crime incidents citywide so far in 2025—higher than any recent year except 2024.
In Over-the-Rhine alone, overall crime is up 48% compared to the same period last year.
This story isn’t just about rising crime — it’s about collapsing trust. It’s about institutions so broken they’d rather handcuff a grieving wife than admit they let a killer walk free. (As I’ve previously disclosed, the same institutional failure protected my own father — a suspected murderer. A pattern is emerging, and it cannot be ignored.)
When civilizations abandon symbolic meaning, justice, and morality, they do not last. What we are witnessing in Cincinnati—and across the U.S.—is not just mismanagement. It is the death spiral of a system that no longer knows what it means to protect its people.
This is not just one case. It is a symptom of a deeper, terminal disease: where necropolitics (coined by Achille Mbembe), the politics of who lives and who dies, has become bureaucratized. And when that happens, the victims are not just those who die, but also those who survive.
Sarah Heringer survived. But she was made to suffer for it. That is your system at work.