My heart breaks for Katie Allison Granju, blogger and author of Attachment Parenting, who lost her eldest son yesterday to complications from a murderous assault and drug overdose several weeks ago.
Katie has been blogging about this horrible experience at mamapundit and at her professional blog on Babble. What she writes is painful to read. There is something there for you, and perhaps you can find something for her and for her family as well. She is asking for support knowing that many people are not interested in pursuing justice for crimes against people with drug problems.
UPDATE. Aunt B. has nailed this:
… it sure as hell is seeming like the Sheriff’s department is trying to cast doubt in the minds of the public as to what actually happened to Henry–not just at the level of whether the assault went down in the way Henry’s family has been able to piece together, but whether he was actually injured in the ways they say he was.
As if a broken jaw is up for dispute.
Couple this with the detective working the case telling Katie that “there is no victim,” and one wonders if they just expected a teenager could be assaulted in Knoxville and, if the police decided he’d done something to deserve it, they could just shrug their shoulders, say some placating bullshit to the family, and get back to other things.
If you are the parent of a teenager or the friend of family member of a teenager in Knoxville, this should scare the shit out of you…
…do you really think that a person or people who can beat another person nearly to death is really just keeping that violence confined to “deserving” addicts?
…You don’t sit back and let “them” kill each other off. Not just because that’s morally repugnant, but because “they” aren’t some confined group over there who keep violence only to themselves. It spreads into the whole community. It affects everyone.
… if this is what they do to well-connected, non-poor, white people with positions of privilege in the community, one wonders what kind of “justice” the rest of the town can count on.
I'm as guilty as anyone of reading stories in the paper of "drug deals gone bad" and mentally classifying the murders as somehow not as bad as, y'know, REAL murder, because the victim wasn't really a victim because it was his own damn fault he was mixed up in that kind of stuff.
For Katie's sake, and Henry's, I will never let myself think such a dehumanizing, immoral thought ever again.
(We got a little taste of this here in South Minneapolis a few years ago when Mark Loesch, a father of four, was beaten to death with a baseball bat while bicycling. One of the first things the police had to say about it was "He was trying to buy drugs." On the word of the guy accused of killing him. Credible? Maybe, but…. Would it have killed the police to say "The accused killer claims that it was a drug deal?" instead of "It appears to have been a drug deal?" They have an interest in promoting the belief that bad things can only happen to you if you invite them… by doing something more than taking a bike ride through the city streets.)
bearing blog 