Marvel Star Bashes Los Angeles Over Skyrocketing Crime Rate

“Avengers” actor Frank Grillo lambasted the crime surge in Los Angeles after the brutal slaying of his friend and trainer in early August. 

Grillo, who played a retired MMA fighter and training gym owner in DirecTV’s “Kingdom” for four seasons, mourned the loss of his boxing trainer Azuma Bennett.

According to Fox News, Grillo said that Bennett “made everybody feel good about training,” adding, “I don’t know what’s happened to Los Angeles that a beautiful guy like this gets shot and killed over nothing.”

Bennett, 30, an Australian transplant who trained celebrity clients at famed Fortune Boxing Gym in Hollywood, was shot “at least eight times” outside of a marijuana dispensary on Aug. 12, and died on the way to the hospital. 

“I do know that his clients were waiting for him at 10 a.m. and he missed that session because he was already gone,” Fortune owner Tamara Fortune remarked about Bennett’s death. 

Grillo went of in a series of Instagram posts last week, sharing articles about Bennett’s slaying with the captions, “Maybe we can force the hand of the powers that be to get off their a—- and fix this s–t,” and “We in LA need to wake up to what has become a common occurrence.”

The actor, who stars in “The Purge” franchise, once said that former President Donald Trump influenced the title of the series’ third film in 2016. 

“In the beginning when we shot the movie it wasn’t called Purge: Election Year. Oddly enough, the guy who plays the President in the movie, he plays him like Trump – totally by accident,” Grillo said. “There’s a lot of parallels between the GOP race and the movie and the messages that are being put forward and then Universal got this great idea to call it Purge: Election Year.”

Marie Finn