White trash guilty of 2nd-degree murder in death of white trash street artist vandal

A Criminal Court judge today found a man guilty of second-degree murder in the fatal 2008 stabbing of a street artist in Chicago.
In rejecting a first-degree murder conviction, Judge Thomas Hennelly ruled that Kirk Tobolski had acted with "sudden and intense passion" when he stabbed Brendan Scanlon during a melee in an alley.
Tobolski, who has been free on $500,000 bond since October 2008, hung his head after Hennelly announced the verdict.
He waved to family members as deputies took him into custody.
Police found Scanlon dead with a stab wound to the heart on June 14, 2008 in the 3000 block of West Palmer Boulevard.
According to testimony during the trial the trouble early that morning began after police broke up a house party across from the OhNo!Doom art gallery, where Scanlon and his roommate, James Cackovic, had attended an exhibition.
As the crowd from the busted party milled at Lyndale Street and Sacramento Avenue, Scanlon and Cackovic attacked and pummeled Neil Barakat, whom they'd recognized from an altercation during a gathering at their apartment months earlier.
Prosecutors said even though Scanlon had started the initial fight, it could have ended there. But moments later, another altercation broke out in the alley where Scanlon had fled.
It was during that melee when Tobolski pulled out a switchblade -- a birthday present he'd gotten just a week before -- and stabbed Scanlon once in the chest as he was being pinned by another man, prosecutors said.
Tobolski's attorney painted Scanlon as the aggressor in a "classic Chicago street fight."
"This was a fight caused and instigated by people who were with the victim, and by the victim himself," Beuke told the court in his opening statement.  
Scanlon grew up in Madison, Wis., and went to art school in Chicago. Using the alias "SOLVE," he was known across Chicago for his art, which often appeared in unusual places -- on the backs of stop signs, on the glass of newspaper boxes and, on one famous occasion, stenciled on a TV secretly installed on a CTA train.