On May 3, 2025, 22-year-old Logan Federico was found dead inside a home in Columbia, South Carolina, after an intruder allegedly broke in while she was visiting friends. Authorities say the young woman was shot in what law enforcement ruled a homicide, and investigators quickly identified a suspect in the violent home invasion. This isn’t a cold case or a tragic accident — it’s the predictable result of a system that repeatedly allows dangerous people back onto the streets.
Police have arrested 30-year-old Alexander Dickey in connection with the killing, and his criminal history reads like a chronicle of failure: roughly 39 arrests and scores of felony charges over the last decade. Despite that record, reporting shows he spent only about 600 days behind bars over ten years before allegedly breaking into multiple homes and committing this horrific crime. To any reasonable person, that math screams negligence by the courts and prosecutors who had chances to keep him locked up.
Logan’s father, Stephen Federico, burned with righteous anger when he took the witness table at a House Judiciary field hearing in Charlotte on September 29, 2025, demanding answers from the officials whose policies and mistakes cost his daughter her life. He stood before lawmakers and a stunned room and said what tens of millions of Americans feel every time the headlines report another preventable slaughter. This was not grandstanding — it was a grieving father calling out a broken justice system for the carnage it allows.
Federico’s testimony was raw and specific, recounting the brutal last moments his daughter endured and forcing lawmakers to imagine their own children in her place. “How many of y’all have kids?” he asked the committee, demanding that lawmakers stop treating these tragedies like statistics and start treating them like crimes with consequences. His pain should shame every official who would shrug and stick to political talking points while families bury their children.
Investigations have already begun to peel back layers of administrative failure: prosecutors and records systems failed to flag prior convictions because arrests weren’t properly entered into statewide fingerprint databases, and one 2014 burglary was treated as a first-time offense because of missing records. Those are not abstract bureaucratic errors — those are clerical and prosecutorial gaps that turned a violent repeat offender into an apparent free man again and again. If states can’t even maintain basic criminal history data, then no reform law will matter until accountability follows.
Republican lawmakers at the hearing rightly pointed to lenient pretrial-release policies, understaffed prosecutor’s offices, and weakened sentencing as the recipe for these tragedies, and they’re pushing fixes to protect victims rather than coddle career criminals. Conservatives will not apologize for insisting that the public’s right to safety outranks the ideological experiment in soft-on-crime governance that has spread through too many Democratic-run cities. Washington can write more reports, or it can restore common-sense policies that keep violent repeat offenders behind bars where they belong.
Steve Federico promised to keep fighting for justice for Logan, and patriotic Americans should stand with him and every family failed by the system. We should demand swift, tangible reforms: enforceable record-keeping, tougher pretrial rules for violent repeat offenders, and real consequences for prosecutors and judges who let dangerous people walk. If our leaders won’t act, voters will — and rightly so, because no parent should have to bury a child because bureaucracy, ideology, or negligence put a career criminal back on the street.
