No jail time for bike courier who killed businessman in street scuffle
The defense presented White as a sensitive, artistic young man who feared his life was threatened by Schellenger, a large man who had been drinking.
A Philadelphia bicycle food courier will serve no jail time after he fatally stabbed a real estate developer in a dispute that arose from a traffic jam.
Michael White, 22, was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation for tampering with evidence — throwing away the bloody knife he used to kill Sean Schellenger, 37. He had been acquitted in October of voluntary manslaughter, obstruction and possessing an instrument of crime.
The altercation between strangers occurred shortly before 11 p.m. on July 12, 2018, in Philadelphia’s trendy Rittenhouse Square neighborhood.
White was on his bike, delivering a Popeye’s Chicken order for Uber Eats; Schellenger was a passenger in a Mercedes-Benz, driving with two friends from dinner to a bar. When the Mercedes was blocked by a car stopped in the street, Schellenger got out to confront the other driver, and White tried to intervene in the situation.
The younger man claims Schellenger uttered a racial slur and moved toward him threateningly. White displayed a knife, but Schellenger lifted him off the ground and toppled over with him. White stabbed him in the back as they fell, then fled. The following day, he turned himself in to police.
Schellenger’s family was vehemently opposed to District Attorney Larry Krasner’s pretrial revision of the charges, dropping first-degree and third-degree murder from consideration.
The case drew attention because of its elements of social division. Chief public defender Keir Bradford-Gray had said during the trial that it was “about a lot of things: race, class. … We can’t negate that.”
The defense presented White as a sensitive, artistic young man who feared his life was threatened by Schellenger, a large man who had been drinking.
Schellenger, who was white, grew up in Philadelphia’s western suburbs and was a quarterback for the Penn State football team. He was engaged to be married.
White, who is African-American, had graduated from the Academy at Palumbo High School near Philadelphia’s Center City and had completed a year at Morgan State University in Baltimore. In a GoFundMe appeal for money to help cover his college costs, he wrote of having to support himself financially as a teenager because his parents were “very uninvolved in my life.”