’72 Seconds in Rittenhouse Square’ explores all sides of a high-profile Philly killing

Tigre Hill’s three-part documentary series, now on Paramount+, is a painstakingly fair exploration of the 2018 murder of Sean Schellenger in Center City Philadelphia and the subsequent trial.

In the calendar year of 2018, there were more than 350 homicides in the city of Philadelphia. But one particular killing in the city may have gotten more media coverage than all of the other deaths put together. 

That was the stabbing death of Sean Schellenger, a relatively well-known 37-year-old real estate developer who, on July 12, 2018, was fatally stabbed by Michael White, a 22-year-old bike courier, following a confrontation that lasted just over a minute. The confrontation took place in one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, just a block away from Rittenhouse Square.

A new documentary, 72 Seconds in Rittenhouse Square comes from area director Tigre Hill, and it’s now streaming in full on Paramount+. 

The story, which earned massive local media attention in the 15 months between the killing and White’s trial the following year, exposed many of Philadelphia’s frequent fault lines. Schellenger was white, while White is Black. Schellenger had wealth, privilege, and famous friends, while White had none of the above (the first voice we hear in the film is that of veteran Philly weatherman John Bolaris, a Schellenger pal). And only one of the two of them had a criminal record or drugs in their system that night (and it wasn’t who you maybe think.) 

The story is expertly presented against the backdrop of Philadelphia today, still debating the decades-ago legacy of 1970s “tough guy” mayor Frank Rizzo, and now amid another culture war over District Attorney Larry Krasner, a lefty defense attorney-turned-“progressive prosecutor” who has sought to combat mass incarceration in the city. (Krasner is the one major living figure in the case to not cooperate with the documentary.) 

These events took place five years ago, so this was all before George Floyd, the gassing of protesters on I-676, and the ultimate removal of the Rizzo statue from City Hall. But it’s not like the film isn’t still relevant.

Just this week, the abrupt dismissal of charges against a police officer accused of shooting a motorist was followed by days of looting. Then came the shooting death of respected local journalist Josh Kruger, which has been greeted with nothing less than unmitigated glee by some of the more loathsome lights of the online right. In part due to an insatiable desire for crime stories about Philadelphia, both have become national news stories.

Those fault lines and culture wars in Philly have been a frequent topic for the series’ director Tigre Hill. He made a fantastic documentary in 2006, The Shame of a City, about the wild 2003 mayoral election in Philadelphia between Democratic Mayor John Street and his Republican challenger Sam Katz. In the last competitive mayoral general election in the city, the race was upended when a bug was found in Street’s office. The film is available in full on Vimeo:

Hill, who is Black, has a bit of a reputation as right-leaning, especially stemming from his past film about the Mumia Abu-Jamal case. But Hill deserves credit for presenting this one down the middle. I could see people watching this film and coming to all sorts of conclusions. 

Mine is this: White was acquitted of the criminal charges after claiming self-defense, and that was the correct verdict. The stabbing clearly came amidst a struggle.

That said, the tragedy could have been avoided if either man had done something that men from all sorts of cultures are taught not to do: Just walk away from the fight before someone gets hurt.  Yes, honor culture is a scourge, and of those 350 homicides, I bet it contributed to at least 300 of them.

Then again, if Sean Schellenger were my friend or family member, there’s a good chance I would be defending him and expressing outrage about how he died. And I’m not entirely certain that evidence of his decade-ago bar fights was necessary or relevant, either to the trial or the film.

Another conclusion? We see Michael White being interrogated right after his arrest, at which point he tells them nothing and asks to see a lawyer. That alone makes him more savvy and astute than about 95 percent of defendants in the history of true crime media. 

The information in the film comes from all sorts of places. White himself is interviewed, as are relatives of both White and Schellenger. There’s a colorful Greek chorus of Philadelphia journalists and other experts, including the likes of Ernest Owens, Christine Flowers, and Ralph Cipriano, all interviewed in non-traditional outdoor locations in Center City. (Also featured is George Parry, the former prosecutor who, in 2011, wrote a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed in which he worried that the Mafia was becoming “gay.”) 

There are lawyers and activists as well, including a man from an organization whose purpose is to negotiate peaceful surrenders to the police. There’s also plenty of local news footage, although inter-Paramount corporate synergy is likely the reason why footage comes from the city’s CBS affiliate. 

There is also security footage from the night in question, from various sources, including a video of the death itself, which was played at trial, although Hill wisely saves it for the film’s final third. 

There are some surprises, most notably when a voicemail is played, the unknown caller argues that White killed Schellenger in self-defense, and then declares “I’m racist, and I still don’t want to see the Black boy go to jail.”

(The killing did not take place in the actual Rittenhouse Square, but rather about a block away, and although the official boundaries of the Rittenhouse neighborhood are known only to certain real estate tycoons who determine them, the murder happened there. But tying a controversial killing to the name “Rittenhouse” conjures the name of Kyle Rittenhouse, hence the “Rittenhouse Square” in the title.)

The Schellengers keep claiming that the stabbing was “racially motivated” and that White killed Schellenger for being white, an assertion for which there’s not a scintilla of evidence. They have what amounts to a conspiracy theory that Krasner lost the case on purpose, but there’s no evidence of that either; if Krasner didn't want to prosecute White, he would have just dropped the charges altogether, something he’s never lacked the willingness to do in the past. 

And the sympathy I had for Schellenger’s mother was significantly lessoned when she was shown talking about this extremely racially fraught case on the Fox News show of the white nationalism-tinged Tucker Carlson, who painted an extremely ugly (and very racist) picture of Philadelphia for his audience- a tendency that, this week has shown, has continued at Fox after Carlson’s departure.

There are also animations, sometimes using actual recordings, and in one case using the Schellenger family’s recollections of a meeting they had with Krasner- the one thing in the film I found a bit iffy. Also, the film’s three parts, in total, are about two hours long, so I’m not sure why this is a three-part series and not just a documentary film. 

It’s also notable that Jim Kenney, then and now the mayor of Philadelphia, is neither seen nor mentioned for the entirety of the film; Kenney has been generally checked out and missing in action for pretty much his whole second term, even during the championship sports runs that most big city mayors like to insinuate themselves into. 

Philadelphia is a city very much at war with itself, and 72 Seconds in Rittenhouse Square is the first piece of media of the current decade to truly capture the dynamics of that. It’s a fine companion to Amateur Night at City Hall, the 1979 documentary about Frank Rizzo, by Robert Mugge, that recently had a rare local screening and can be streamed for free on Tubi.