Category Archives: crime

The Central American Crisis

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For nearly 20 years young people, mostly women, have been the victims of rape and murder in Juarez, a city neatly adjacent to El Paso, Texas.

They even have a name for it–feminicidio, the murder of women.

Not once have I ever heard anyone in our government say we need to provide asylum to the women and children of Juarez.

Perhaps we should.

But as a one-time resident of Central America and a long-time advocate for children, especially those who have refugee issues, the sudden trucking out of an “emerging Central American crisis” feels deeply political and not very honest.

When in our lifetime has Central America been stable? The eighties?!?

Not a chance.

This particular iteration of the absolute disaster that is American foreign policy ignores completely the fact that…

These countries have been de facto war zones for decades.

The children have not just started coming, some of them came years ago. Many came to the US and joined gangs affiliated with the conflicts in their home countries.

And many also have the usual spectrum of emotional and mental problems that go with trauma, upheaval, social disintegration, and loss of caregiver relationships.

We cannot afford to anonymize these minors. Where they go, who they go with, and how they cope all matter so much.

What do you know about the gang affiliations of refugee and immigrant teens in your area? What do you know about attachment disorder?

You cannot haphazardly throw money or executive orders at children.

You gotta have an actual plan.

Yep. And I still think we owe the children of Mexico an apology.

Isn’t their failed state as disastrous as all the others?

The Children’s Crusade

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Are they insane?!

That was my first and unwavering reaction to the very quiet news that tens of thousands of minors are being transported and dumped illegally on our southern border.

And the administration’s response is simply to let them stay?

There are several profound issues here–

Parental consent and supervision

Apparent lack of any interest in arresting the criminals capitalizing on and exploiting these minors

The disturbing implications of labeling a potentially felonious 16 or 17 year old “a child” and giving him a free pass to stay or…

The open and volatile question–are young children being trafficked across our borders with the tacit endorsement of the current?

Each of these minors are at risk for exploitation by their coyotes.

Good people do not smuggle children for profit.

And last of all–this is a huge issue. Why would it ever be less newsworthy than bad movies and celebrity rumors?

What is wrong with us that this does not matter?

An old story for a new friend

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I sat on the beat up couch and told my mil the story that had just unfolded with heartbreaking force–years of sexual abuse perpetrated by our adopted son Charles. Stopped as soon as it was uncovered but not soon enough to obviate years of damage and pain.

She looked stunned (of course) and managed something about God blessing our family.

At the time I thought, does she see what I cannot?

God has blessed me. God has blessed my family. But she did not know what she was talking about. She was a woman on the mainland of “normal” and I was drifting in the dinghy of “messed up life.”

Attachment disorder will do that to ya. It will put you out to sea with issues so devastating that Richard Parker starts to look like a tabby cat.

Love, if you hear adults, professionals, “experts,” tell you things that do not make sense, learn from my lonely voice.

Your children all have an equal right to live in peace, safety, and love. If one of those children threatens the safety of the others…

Yell loud at anyone who will listen. And don’t stop until you get the help you need.

You have a right to live free from the constant threat of harm.

And so do your wee ones.

When things break

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Who can describe the sound?
The alarm of breaking china
Signals something–an ambulance
Or police car?

What if they did not come on time?
And the victim
Was trapped with
Both the criminal and the injury for years?

When you hear the sound
You think staccato things
Broken? Injury? Oh…broken injury
A redundancy of pain

In the face of a beautiful child
China round and smooth
Now lies in pieces

I can clean up pieces.

But I don’t
You and your sister do

Because I am trapped in a room
In a day
In a nightmare

Where a little girl believes
It is her fault
All her fault

When it is not
At all.

Beneath the mango tree…

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We need pictures.

Pictures of the people we have lost.

And smells as well.

In May the mango trees would be in full leaf, but not fruit, months from the vinegary rot of dropped fruit- a condition you might never smell if the people who lived close to the tree were poor and hungry.

I used to live near mango trees. Despite what might get picked or eaten, dozens of mangos would fall to rot on the ground.

So to hang children on a mango tree. What does that mean? To hang them by their own clothes after they have been raped and brutalized?

To do all of this with family. To do it deliberately.

To lie in wait for girls to go to a field to relieve themselves.

To believe you will not face justice.

To almost not.

We need to see the tree. We need to see the broken girls. We need to face how close they are to our own.

Years ago I had a normal conversation with Charles after he talked to a pretty girl his age at a playground. I asked him about the girls he liked. He gave me a blurry answer except for this–

not Asian.

The not Asian has haunted me since I discovered that he abused children. He groomed us all. He was so very careful. Did he tell me that to deceive me? Did he tell me everything to deceive me?

We need a picture. A picture of grief. A picture of murdered children.

And another picture as well–

A picture into the mind of hate. The excuses, lusts, and prejudice that could effectively strip men of the last shreds of decency. The last vestiges of the soul.

What Good Does It Do?

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There are only a couple people I have ever met who I have wanted to actually kick.

I say a couple in case I am missing someone.

The one person I know I wanted to kick was my adopted son after I found out he had molested children.

We took him in.

We cared for him.

He violated children.

How do you get past that?

You don’t.

You go through it, and it changes you.

I did not kick him. No one did. In fact, very, very, few people confronted him at all.

It is hard to confront evil.

The other day I was standing in a beautiful place surrounded by people I admired, listening to the blast of a radio station–the foulest, most misogynistic rap I have ever heard.

How could someone write, “sing,” produce, edit, air, or listen to such explicit “music?”

Outside of hell. Each “song” seemed to be reminiscent of the soundtrack of hell.

Literal hell.

I was once chided for objecting to a hip-hop song with lyrics about infanticide- my fault for listening to the words in the first place?

As though it were a moral ideal to simply avoid the existence of evil.

I write all of this because it is worth pondering what exactly Jay-Z did to incite his sister-in-law’s wrath.

I have lots of family members who are real weenies but I don’t want to kick them.

You want to kick someone when they really hurt someone you love.

Do you love Adrianna Waller? Do you even know her story?

Can you face the pain she faced alone? A helpless baby.

Can you face the man who tortured her to death? Or the inevitable waves of pain, grief, and anger his actions unleashed in the lives of every single person who had to live past his aggression?

Can you reckon with his unrepentant soul?

Can you factor in the role of pornography in his premeditated rape of a baby? Or the pain and confusion of her agonizing death?

I cannot.

For the first month after I found out that my adopted son had molested children I cried. I yelled, ranted, grieved.

I will never even be able to reckon with his unrepentant soul.

And so far, his victims have survived his evil–scarred but whole. Lonely and aggrieved, but alive.

If we cannot face evil, how can we begin to overcome it?

And if we do not overcome it: what good do we do?

Atonement

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This weekend my glasses snapped–broken down their center line.

My friend helped fix them temporarily with a bit of purple tape. It was not my most fashionable weekend.

But I was catching glimpses of the crucifixion–reading chapters from the gospel. Little snapshots–Jesus betrayed, Jesus beaten, Jesus mocked, scorned, tried.

At what point would he have lost his glasses? I do not believe he needed them, let us be clear, but the question lingered–at what point did the story of the death of Christ become unbearable?

Pretty early on.

Jesus suffered agony and humiliation in my place. He took on more pain than we can bear to even contemplate.

Our mistake. We should.

Because the Cross was agony we have the glimpse and promise of heaven.

Jesus paid it all.

For us, with the rank winds of hell at our backs.

Charles Frederick Warner’s Legal Rights

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I believe anyone who is fighting for Warner’s right to life should have to read his trial record. We have seen massive media attention playing up the inhumane factors in death by lethal injection, but few people are willing to print the whole truth–millions of dollars have been spent trying to protect the life of a man who raped and murdered a baby. Little or nothing has been done to heal the wound this man left in the world.

Killing Charles Frederick Warner will not remedy his monstrous crime, nor will it restore the life of his primary victim. A playful little baby was turned into the recipient of unimaginable violence and premeditated rape.

One has to wonder about all the “good people” who defended this man–he did not file legal motions by himself. He had a mess of defense witnesses. Who are these people? What is their motivation?

Have we created a partisan team mentality that parses out the egregious crime and unrepentant criminal from the desire for safety for our babies?

Adrianna deserved to live. And once that right was taken from her she deserved justice.

The Abuse of Clayton D. Lockett

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I was re-reading about the sentencing of Lockett for a night of abduction, felony assault, rape, and murder.

The story is as hard to read as any such crime spree–the action of violence spiral out from a center of evil. And we have to face that evil was unleashed by a very deliberate man.

Lockett’s original defense called people to testify that he had been abused and abandoned as a child and was subjected to “homosexual rape.”

They called upon a caseworker to testify that when children are subjected to this kind of abuse they usually suppress rage that leads them to become abusers.

Wow.

Ironically the court record regarding Charles Warner alleges that he physically abused his children.

Are we really to assume these victims of rape and abuse are ticking bombs who will eventually become violent criminals themselves?

No.

It is one more heartbreaking example of the way we fail to protect our children or help them heal when things go wrong.

The vast majority of people who survive child abuse and sexual assault live with the scars and the silence, but they are good people, good parents, normal and law-abiding.

The myth of the psychopathic rape survivor is one more act of shame done unto them, forcing victims into a silent margin.

Lockett was responsible for his crimes. And he had so many other roads he could have taken instead of leading Stephanie Neiman to a agonizing death.