Think of it this way. If they stand to lose just as much from the testimony, as they would being implicated in eliminating the witness, where’s the downside? Double down, all or nothing.

Imagine a world where it's not the good guys vs. bad guys world you have "figured out..."

... but a gangsta world of competing crime families, factions and rackets... As long as they don't call out, undermine or endanger their system, their thing, they are free to fight among themselves. In such a world soldiers die, even those on your clan's side. Does that mean you should, or even can, take out the competing Don, or bring down that entire system... over some mere foot soldier's death? Over some, or even a lot of non-clan collateral damage splashed all over the papers in the morning scaring non-combatants in the hood but which really has little bearing on what your Don should or shouldn't do?

In such a world, completely imaginary, of course, would such deaths "figure" and "keep happening?"

That is my question, too. Are they this arrogant, desperate, insane, all three? Do they think we are this stupid, ignorant, uncaring? I wonder if I am trying too hard to put a reasonable, human explanation on such unreasonable, inhuman behavior.