![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
more sadness and death
Jan. 2nd, 2017 02:45 pmso, the day after xmas, I see a post from my birthday twin/former neighbor about a birthday twin of *his* having gone missing on christmas. car description, license plate, photo, please keep an eye out. She was friends with a lot of my friends, being both in the dc theatre and yoga worlds. So a bunch of my friends are posting about this, there was a facebook group for the search that ballooned to a couple thousand people pretty quickly. Everyone was hoping against hope that she would turn up...
Late in the day, the police released a photo of a person of interest. My birthday twin posted a screencap* of it, and about an hour later a friend of his commented that he'd just seen the guy, in her car, in dupont, and called police. The police picked him up a few blocks away.
Word came in the middle of the night they had found her body. More horrible details everyone had been hoping weren't the case came out in the arraignment. She died by blunt force trauma and strangulation. She'd been raped. He'd been driving around with her body in the car the entire day. He picked up a prostitute in the car. (I don't know if the prostitute came forward/was identified; hopefully she was not killed.) He robbed a store and assaulted an employee that morning.
He has a long string of court cases, and was apparently homeless. He should have been wearing an ankle monitor, but never showed up for that appointment. The courts did not follow up.
I started looking at his court cases. The store he robbed? was in my office building. The last assault case from this fall that magically was dismissed because the witness failed to show up? a few blocks away from work. a store he is forbidden to enter due to robbery and assault? near by home. The whole thing has just been making me sad. and afraid. I don't recognize him, but clearly this is someone that has spent a lot of time in the same areas I do. There is a constant level of panhandlers in front of work, some aggressive and some not and now I just... don't want them anywhere near me. I don't know how to balance empathy and feeling safe. And I find myself irrationally angry at the front desk security at work. What use are armed guards that sit on their ass in a glass lobby when they do nothing about an assault 20 feet away? When that poor girl was tied up, dead, in her car outside? What use is our fucking judicial system when they just let these guys go, over and over and over again?
I don't have any good answers. I'm just... sad.
And then today I have discovered that my favorite weaselly past-boss has died suddenly. no word on how, or why. He was three weeks older than me. Feeling my mortality extra hard these weeks.
-----
*social media lessons learned: The screencap photo was more likely to show up in newsfeeds than the link to the facebook post, missing person report, or the POI update. If you need to get something to the bulk of your audience, posting it as a new photo is the way to go. Add the source link as a comment after.
Late in the day, the police released a photo of a person of interest. My birthday twin posted a screencap* of it, and about an hour later a friend of his commented that he'd just seen the guy, in her car, in dupont, and called police. The police picked him up a few blocks away.
Word came in the middle of the night they had found her body. More horrible details everyone had been hoping weren't the case came out in the arraignment. She died by blunt force trauma and strangulation. She'd been raped. He'd been driving around with her body in the car the entire day. He picked up a prostitute in the car. (I don't know if the prostitute came forward/was identified; hopefully she was not killed.) He robbed a store and assaulted an employee that morning.
He has a long string of court cases, and was apparently homeless. He should have been wearing an ankle monitor, but never showed up for that appointment. The courts did not follow up.
I started looking at his court cases. The store he robbed? was in my office building. The last assault case from this fall that magically was dismissed because the witness failed to show up? a few blocks away from work. a store he is forbidden to enter due to robbery and assault? near by home. The whole thing has just been making me sad. and afraid. I don't recognize him, but clearly this is someone that has spent a lot of time in the same areas I do. There is a constant level of panhandlers in front of work, some aggressive and some not and now I just... don't want them anywhere near me. I don't know how to balance empathy and feeling safe. And I find myself irrationally angry at the front desk security at work. What use are armed guards that sit on their ass in a glass lobby when they do nothing about an assault 20 feet away? When that poor girl was tied up, dead, in her car outside? What use is our fucking judicial system when they just let these guys go, over and over and over again?
I don't have any good answers. I'm just... sad.
And then today I have discovered that my favorite weaselly past-boss has died suddenly. no word on how, or why. He was three weeks older than me. Feeling my mortality extra hard these weeks.
-----
*social media lessons learned: The screencap photo was more likely to show up in newsfeeds than the link to the facebook post, missing person report, or the POI update. If you need to get something to the bulk of your audience, posting it as a new photo is the way to go. Add the source link as a comment after.
