Every murder is dreadful. Let’s stipulate to that.
This spring, we’ve had an increase in gangsters killing each other, which is what gangsters do.
We’ve also had murders baffling in their brutality, appalling in the innocence of the victims. In March, a guy consumed by self-pity took an ax to his estranged wife and her grown daughter. In April, a woman walked out on her husband, who responded by shooting four of his children in their beds, another as she fought for her life in a bathroom, and then himself.
And last week, a thug shot Loomis Armored Car driver Kurt Husted in a crowded Wal-Mart for a bag of money. One of the thug’s accomplices told cops he felt bad about Husted’s death. But, he said, “I would have gotten over it because of the money.”
That night, two of their accused cohorts spent $175 of their $60,000 haul on a celebratory dinner at Red Lobster. What kind of people – and I use the term loosely – take a life and then go out for a nice dinner?
These are the murders that grip us. These are the calamities that could happen to us, or the people we love.
They’ve left us asking what’s going on that so many people should be killed even as their neighbors are working to make their communities safer.
Is it the economy? Too few law enforcement officers, jail cells or social services?
What can we do to make it stop?
Those are the right questions, and asking them a hundred times before has saved lives.
After Tacoma Police Chief David Brame shot his wife, Crystal Judson Brame, in a parking lot, in front of their children, we scoured the system and found it fatally flawed. The community demanded, and got, changes from leadership to rules to resources. Every day, the Crystal Judson Family Justice Center assists people who must get away from an abuser.
Now that we know what works, we can always use more of it.
But even a good system can’t save everyone. People snap in unpredictable ways in so-called crimes of passion. Or they go to Wal-Mart and plot crimes of dispassion.
As much as we try to find a pattern, something on which to build a way to protect ourselves, there are times when we can’t.
Sometimes, there’s nothing there but coincidence and a spark of evil.
And here’s the irony: When there is a pattern to be found, sometimes it is in the crimes against people for whom we have the least sympathy.
All year long, we’ve had a semi-constant graph of gang violence spiking up like spray paint on a fence.
Gang life is rotten, and gang death is one of its logical conclusions.
It is utterly predictable.
Posing with their fake sense of honor, gangsters shoot each other, and haul their friends and family into the drama of the conflict. They and their tribe have a penchant for romanticizing the carnage. They paint elaborate R.I.P. tributes on their vehicles’ rear windows. They photoshop their dead into haloed angels. As if.
They make death itself contagious.
Thousands of Tacomans, police, building inspectors, lawyers, judges, jailers, neighborhood groups, teachers are on the case. They’re committed to breaking the gangs through prevention, community policing, and busting the bad guys.
There are hundreds of solid citizens out there who never dreamed they’d learn how to decipher the messages in graffiti, so they can relay the word painted on the street to the cops, then paint over the vandalism.
Just last weekend, 67 volunteers spread out in work parties and eradicated 50 tagged blight spots, plus a highway retaining wall they’d abated just a few weeks earlier. The gang bangers had come back and used rollers instead of spray paint cans to deface it.
If ever there was thankless, discouraging work, that’s it. But the good guys keep at it.
Even if the gangsters don’t care about their own lives.
Because every murder – whether predictable or random, emotional or emotionless – is dreadful.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
