We have been watching the story unfold for the
last few nights on the local news.
It is a story we have heard before, with minor variations. It goes like this.
A young, dark, evil-looking man has killed his
ex-girlfriend's mother in her driveway and taken the ex-girlfriend
hostage. Every night, just after
the weather and before the sports, we are reminded that he is believed to be
traveling about with this woman, and that he is, as they say,
believed to be armed and dangerous.
No kidding.
Tonight we hear that the police finally cornered him in an old apartment building, which they efficiently evacuated and
placed under siege. The killer
soon released his ex-girlfriend (it is his true love for her, after all, that
has started all this), and settled in for the obligatory night of phone calls
from the police negotiator.
Now the clean-cut District Attorney is telling
us how it ended. At some point the
police decided that the “situation” could not be brought to a peaceful
resolution. Just what led to that
conclusion is not explained, although it was awfully cold out. In any event, someone decided it was
time to storm the apartment building.
Apparently that was enough to also convince the man barricaded inside
that the situation could not be brought to a peaceful resolution, and so he
shot himself in the head. The
District Attorney says, with a straight face, “Unfortunately the suspect shot
himself before we were able to reach him.”
I wonder what the District Attorney
would say if he could look directly into the camera, like they sometimes do on
clever television comedies, and tell the audience what he really was
thinking. I know what I would
say.
We waited for a good long time for this guy to
come out and give himself up to our usually fair and generally lenient system
of criminal justice. Having waited
through most of the night, we should not be required to wait indefinitely,
further endangering and inconveniencing the people we evicted from the
neighborhood and all of these policemen who have spent the night crouching
behind their patrol cars while their own women and children are worried
sick. So we went in to seize him
but he shot himself first. That’s
the way it goes sometimes with these extremely troubled, extremely violent
types.
And on the whole it is not such a bad
result. This way the ex-girlfriend
(whose condition no one has asked about) does not have to live through all this again at the trial for murder and kidnapping. She can begin to try to put this behind
her as best she can; and if we put half as many resources into helping the victims
as we did housing and feeding the offenders, no doubt she might have a better
time of it. And, come to think of
it, this also allows us to avoid the considerable expense of housing and
feeding and psychoanalyzing this very troubled, very violent man.
Even more to the point is this simple
question: who would be better off
if he had surrendered and lived?
Not the killer, who has expressed rather clearly his own preference in
the matter. Presumably not the
ex-girlfriend, who, among other things, now is spared the agony of waiting for
the parole board to release the killer from prison. Who?
In short, I did not wish for the killer’s
suicide, but neither am I troubled by it.
I am reminded of a line in an essay I read a
few weeks ago – to the effect that remembering, like burying one’s dead, is an
act of mercy. That is one thing that burying the dead can
be. It also can just be about
preventing the smell and disease.
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