Category Archives: crime

Jay, Serial-podcast-Jay

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I have a bad habit of wanting to adopt people, and one of the people I would like to adopt is Jay.

Jay without a last name Jay

Jay from Serial Jay.

I know we are all deeply imperfect, flawed, untrustworthy, which makes adoption risky for all parties, but the way Jay was described in this week’s Serial podcast made me want to adopt him.

It seems to me, a kid like Jay deserved a chance. And if he told a messy version of the truth–some version of the truth, then he was one more victim of a terrible, terrible crime.

That is something that echoes in nearly all the voices in this story–people now in there 30s grappling with a violent loss.

The effect of the murder of Hae Min Lee was so devastating for so many.

Where do you go? Where would you go with such a fragile, unbearable story?

Hae Min Lee

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Like millions of other listeners, I have become deeply entrenched in Serial, an episodic treatment of the murder of Hae Min Lee in 1999.

The podcasts are mostly riveting and leave the listener grasping for answers.

But some things demand to be confronted emotionally, not just in the clinical language of forensics, but in the enduring vortex of loss and grief.

I have hunted for archival traces Hae Min Lee–glimpses of the girl from before her life taken and then reduced to jurisprudential conjecture.

Who was Hae Min Lee to those who loved her? A picture, a memorial–something. I found this– a piece on her memorial.

She played lacrosse…

left a grieving family…

…a family whose grief is indicated mostly by their present silence. Surely they would be appalled by the surgical reduction of this vivid girl to…a piece of evidence not properly disposed of.

I keep returning to the snowstorm; days her family must have spent hoping and praying for her safe return.

When she could not.

Would not.

Ever.

Because she had been rendered helpless, cold, and alone in the shallow grave, in the silence of falling snow.

It seems to me American justice requires a return to that quiet wood and all the things that were stolen from Hae Min Lee.

Perhaps we are all too accustomed to our fictional procedurals to realize that real crime leaves empty places in the heart and a grief that never lifts or relents.

When the rain comes

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In the years of this drought I have questioned–what if the water does not return?

Sometimes we have gone months and months without a drop.

There are people in my life whose lives are desert-y lives. Not just sit on the couch desert, full-blown felony and addiction desert.

They challenge my faith. So I tell God–I believe, help my unbelief.

And He says–

It is unfair to the desert to judge it definitively when there is no rain.

Rain changes things. Rain brings life and washes away the dust. Rain makes rivers in the desert, streams of water where nothing could grow.

So I pray for rain.

Jesus says he is living water. Living water poured out for us. He does not just bring the rain, he is the rain.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and a Lesson in Free Speech

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The story goes something like this: a 50 year old man targets little kids at a water park and takes dozens of pictures of their private areas.

He gets arrested and prosecuted under a law intended to protect adults from non-consensual voyeuristic photography.

Two Texas courts upend the
conviction on the basis that the behavior of the defendant was a form of free speech.

I think they may have overlooked the difference between photographic predation and free speech.

So here are some examples of free speech:

Taking pictures of other people without consent for the purposes of sexual gratification is not free speech. It is a form of exploitation

Free speech.

What ass’s orifice do these people have their heads lodged in?

Free speech.

Have they lost any perspective on the implications for children of allowing them to be exploited at public parks and pools?

Free speech.

The defendant’s lawyers said the law is “Orwellian.” Perhaps all parties need to read Orwell before they drag him into defending a pedophile.

Free speech.

And last but not least–

News feeds are glutted with comments about the actresses whose naked pictures were hacked and leaked. I read this as a stand-alone article from an English news source.

Shouldn’t the lack of concern for the safety of our children be a bigger deal?

Free speech.

Foley and Sotloff

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I grieve for these lost men
Think about their brokenhearted mothers
Avoid an accounting of the days and the pain and dogs of souls

who could exact such cruelty on…ordinary men

It is easier not to go
To the places these men went
And the place where they were
Cut to pieces

But we must

Ask ourselves what has become of
Us, the Geneva Convention, the boundaries of

Words, only words
strung words together
No guns, no knives, no ammunition
Pictures taken of war
If you can even call it that

They say they got Capone for tax evasion
Not murder
And I wonder if these boys who hide their faces and play “gods and men”
Like a game without a score

Know the second commandment (say nothing of the 6th)
Still applies to their eternal souls:

Forget all else you have done
And understand you owe God for life
For these pictures you have taken
Of Foley and Sotloff

There will be
Forever
Nowhere to hide.

Grover Cleveland–rapist bully?!

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This article is appalling. It outlines a story of date rape, aggression, child abandonment, and political bullying perpetrated by one of our nation’s presidents. The story was aired and well-documented before his election.

Yet none of the story is found on his Wikipedia page.

I think it is time to speak bluntly about a man who appears to have fooled a lot of people but who was a predator and a liar.

And a textbook example of a sexual predator who hides his crimes and brutalizes his victims.

If Cleveland can have fooled us all, what predators do you know who appear honest and trustworthy, even though they are decidedly not?

My Monster

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My monster sits
At the kitchen table
Gnawing on the hollowed bones
Finding scraps of meat left on them
they say you can choke on these broken shards of wings, thighs
The breasts of flightless birds

Few eat their filigreed
Hearts
But when they do you can see through
Each vivisected chamber

He mutters only phrases
Like girl, you know…girl if only…
If only you had..
He is so very clever to leave out
All the
Proper nouns
Dependent clauses
Merciless verbs
years and years of completely merciless verbs

Ellipses for teeth
Never dulled to the task
Of separating bone from marrow
You tell me the vultures
Are being decimated
By poison and other modern perils
Leaving the dead all alone
In their towers of silence

And I know this must be true for Rizpah will shoo them off
Until God chooses to relent…

This drought will define us
Cotton-mouthed and bone-dry
So cavalier about our own now-
Forgotten prayers
For rain

Do something (brave)

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My blog is littered with drafts. I haven’t published anything for awhile because I struggle with–why bother?

In the aftermath of what happened to my family, a lot of people let us down.

It could have been because I was too vocal. It could have been because we were too risky. It could have been a lot of things.

It took a toll on my evaluation of humans. How could so many “nice people” run like rabbits? Or worse. There was always worse.

I battled insomnia. If a person you have fed peanut butter sandwiches can hurt children, the world feels permanently unsafe.

I wrote. I wrote and then wondered why?

Then I began wakeboarding.

I like wakeboarding because no one tells me I can’t do the things that terrify me. In fact, they show me how.

I like it because the people there are brave.

Not just spin-in-the-air brave, but also push-yourself brave.

Many of these brave people restore my faith in our broken world.

Which leads me to “ordinary brave”–

Men who are faithful to their wives are brave.

Judges who prosecute pedophiles are brave.

Health officials who fly into an Ebola epidemic are brave.

Paying your bills and your taxes on time

Holding a lackluster job to provide for your family

Befriending the powerless–

All brave.

When I see brave, I want to be brave.

The no-bark collar

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For years I labored under the illusion that child sexual abuse was rare and that the victims could find help, even if their parents were indifferent or the abusers.

Wrong and wrong.

More than half of all children are victims of sexual assault before they reach the age of 18.

Most if not all of us have known and/or been groomed by a sexual predator.

And yet…

The pressure to not talk about the known sexual predators among us is so strong that I frequently write posts and then refrain from publishing them.

I am an old woman and a mouthy one at that, but I have been told explicitly to shut up and shunned implicitly for speaking out against child sexual abuse.

The pressuring is convincing and effacing.

Imagine what it would do to a child.