On September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill opened fire at Dawson College in Montreal, killing Anastasia De Sousa and injuring 19 other people. He apparently blogged about his violent tendencies on a vampire website, but had no previous criminal record.
Not long after that, Shannon Torrez slit the throat of young mother Stephenie Ochsenbine and kidnapped her newborn baby, all while Stephanie's 1-year-old child was also in the home. Fortunately, Stephanie lived, her 1-year-old was not hurt, and the baby was returned unharmed.
Unfortunately, around the same time in nearby in St. Louis, Tiffany Hall cut an unborn baby from her good friend Jimella Tunstall's womb, and drowned Jimella's children before stuffing their bodies into a washer and dryer. Hall claimed Jimella's baby as her own and tried to have a funeral before her boyfriend turned her in.
Sept. 27, 2006, in Colorado, homeless 53-year-old petty criminal Duane Morrison took six teen girls hostage in a high school English class, molested them, then shot Emily Keyes in the head before shooting himself. Morrison may have researched the victims on myspace.
Sept. 29, 2006, 15-year-old Wisconsin teen Eric Hainstock shot and killed his school principal John Klang. Apparently the teen was angry after being disciplined for bringing tobacco to school. He was also angry about some kids at school who were teasing him and he felt that the teachers and administrators were not helping him.
On October 2, 2006, in Pennsylvania, a milk truck driver Charles Roberts took a schoolroom of Amish children hostage and shot the girls, ages 6-12. He may have called his wife from a cell phone and told her he was "acting out in revenge for something that happened 20 years ago."
These acts were not just committed by loners and outcasts. Hall was a mother herself, and Roberts a husband and father of three. Or, perhaps, in some way, this society has made us all into loners and outcasts, adrift and helpless and disconnected, and more likely to fall apart?
I struggle to understand all of this violence, so much of it against women and girls, within the past month. Why did it happen? Do we blame parents? But, the killers ranged in age from 15 to 53, most of them well beyond the age of parental supervision.
Do we blame easy access to guns? Hall and Torrez did not use guns, they used common, everyday sharp objects, or water.
Do we blame a world in which war is nothing more than just another video game? Gill did like violent video games, but I don't think Morrison was playing them while he lived in his car.
Readers' choice: It's a failure to breastfeed? It's because women don't stay home with their children? Absent fathers? Too much spanking? Not enough spanking? Music? Culture? TV? Lack of religion? Religious nuts? Ritalin? Prozac? Or just plain evil?
Could it be that in times of societal turmoil, more people simply snap? We do live in stressful times. The largest private employer in the country Wal Mart is forcing people into low-wage, part-time jobs without medical benefits or even time off to be with their families. We are struggling with a lot of things and we can't seem to win - the War in Iraq, the War on Drugs, failing schools, too much sex and violence on TV, obesity ...
While the institutions we would normally fall back upon are faltering ... governments and churches are full of perverts and greed ... tens of thousands of people die each year from mistakes made by doctors and medical professionals ... families are driven apart by long working hours, high debt, drugs, too many hours of homework required by public schools leaves little family time ... and of course there's always the perennial divorce rate ...
At the end of the day, I think it boils down to isolation. We don't know who our neighbors are, we hardly know who our spouses are, do we even know who we are? Kimveer Gill was contemptous of his fellow humans. Torrez unsuccessfully struggled with her grief over not being able to have a child of her own. God alone knows what was going through Hall's mind, but she had several boyfriends and was a single mom, which isn't exactly what I would call stable and secure. Morrison was homeless. Hainstock was allegedly teased at school and angry that no one would do anything about it. Roberts acted out because he was dealing with some kind of demons from something that happened 20 years ago.
It's even been said that the victims in Colorado were found and targeted through myspace. Teen girls reaching out into the void for something, and getting evil. It's so sad.
Not that I want to excuse the horror and evil committed by Gill, Torrez and the others. But I am trying to figure out - trying to comprehend - where things go terribly wrong.
I was struck by something I heard on TV this morning: An expert on Amish culture said that the Amish would recover quickly from the tragedy because they have a deep social and spiritual network of extended family and community. Maybe that's the key.
I don't know. There's no point to this post, no point except that I am confronted by terrible evil every time I look at the news, and it upsets me.
John Donne said in 1624, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
The bell is tolling. It's tolling hard.
