On Sunday night, just a block and a half away from my home in a very quiet golf course neighborhood, five people were shot to death in what police are calling a murder suicide. Monday morning, the street was still blocked off with police tape, and news trucks with very tall satellite hookups lined the adjacent streets. As I drove to the grocery store I was met by a line of cars, filled with insensitive people, coming to gawk at the circus.
And on the local paper's website, hundreds of readers posted the most absurd comments imaginable. A sample: these were renters and renters are scum; our city isn't safe anymore; cheap houses have brought in gangs and low-life; it was probably illegal immigrants; I'm moving to Alaska. Other readers chastised their fellow readers for their negative value judgments and prejudice. Of course, no one knew the facts; no one knew who had died.
Today we know the identities of the victims, but we still don't know who did the shooting. A man and his seventeen year old son died, as did the man's girlfriend and her fifteen year old twin girls. There were gathered together for a Veteran's Day barbecue; a flag waved from a flagpole over the garage.
None of the neighbors seem to know much about the family, other than that the father who died was the only permanent resident of the home. His son, who died with him, and his daughter, who escaped, lived (live) with their mother. The entire family had lived together in a different home in this development as recently as a few years ago. Then, apparently, the couple divorced.
Speculation is that it was the teenage boy who pulled the trigger, although no law enforcement official has confirmed this. What can be assumed, however, is that at least one of the people in that house on Sunday was very disturbed and had access to a deadly weapon to express his or her pain.
Although this incident will not get the same media attention as other multiple murders - eg. the Simpson case, Columbine, Virginia Tech - some will use it to speculate about who and what is to blame for one more example of senseless violence. It's guns, some will say, or violent video games. Others will blame parental neglect of a troubled teen.
Since we still have little information, it seems premature to pin the blame on anyone. However, one thing seems clear. This is a family that was isolated from its neighbors, a family that was broken, a family that had few lifelines to grab onto, a family whose distress was invisible.
And that seems to be the single unifying characteristic in nearly every instance of mass killing we have seen in the news over the past few years, from the school shootings to the family murder-suicides. To some extent the family, and especially the shooter, are not well connected to the neighbors and the larger community, so that when the tragedy finally happens, everyone is surprised. No one saw it coming because no one really saw the individuals who were so troubled.
This is the disease of our times. We are all isolated, to some extent, from each other. We know our neighbors by name, but we do not learn much more about them. They go about their business and we go about ours. We get into our cars, drive off to work, have a superficial relationship with those at the office, drive home after work, enter our garages by pressing the automatic door opener, hit the button again to close the door, and go into our house. We're rarely outside where we might converse with neighbors. We don't go outside to wash our own cars, mow our own lawns, or pull our own weeds. Those things are largely done by the illegal immigrants we insist should go home.
Whatever troubles we have stay within the confines of our "castles," which may not be surrounded by moats and fortified walls, but might as well be. Isolation is what breeds the despair that leads to these horrifying outbursts of violence. Interestingly, the neighbors say the teenage boy was outside washing his truck the morning of the shooting. No one, however, says they talked to him. What if someone had? What if just one person came over and showed some interest? Might it have made a difference? If, indeed, he was the shooter, might that small display of interest been the one thing that made him feel validated and hopeful and stopped him from the action he took?
