Murder in my backyard

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Aparently this story was national news for a bit.

A local student, Michelle Gardner-Quinn, was walking back to campus late last Friday night after spending the night out at the bars, and never made it home.

Her body was found a few days later about 20 miles out of town.

The prime suspect is a guy whose phone she borrowed that night because hers had lost its charge. He’s been arrested on some unrelated charges of sexual misconduct with a minor.

Today’s paper has an article about her memorial service, but there are links from that article to all the previous coverage, if you’re curious.

Now, I don’t know why exactly, but this story has hit me pretty hard.

I didn’t know Michelle at all. But, this sort of thing is a very unusual occurance in Burlington. People have been killed here before, some rather recently. They always seem to be drug-deal-related incidents, or people killing people they know (quarrels and so forth). This seems (so far) to have been completely random; a crime of oportunity only.

Michelle was walking home, happened to ask the wrong person to borrow his cell phone, and that was it.

This was basically my back yard. Burlington is a small city. I very well could have been walking home on that same street that same night. We might have even been in the same bar at one point that evening. The place where the suspect claims he last saw Michelle is on the corner, two houses from an old apartment of mine, and across the street from the middle and elementary schools where my girlfriend works.

The body was found about a mile from another old apartment of mine, where I lived for a year and a half, and walked frequently.

I’m not sure what it is. Tragedy happens all around. Almost all of the time I am able to view it with distance and perspective. Somehow this story has got me really upset. This is my town; my back yard. Some guy picked a woman at random and murdered her on my turf.

So, I don’t know; read the article I guess. This is a woman who probably knew people I know, who was kidnapped and murdered by a stranger about a 10 minute walk from my house.

2

I’ve been following this story too, and it just blows my mind. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen here. It happens in big cities, in slums, but not here. It’s one in a string of incidents lately that just made me realize this isn’t the same state I grew up in anymore. There was the school shooting in August (it wasn’t a student, for those that don’t know, but it happened at a school,) and a lockdown at another school the other week because of a possible gun-toting person (turned out to most likely be either a couple of hunters or a guy with just a camera filming wildlife.)

I can’t imagine what her family has been going through this past week, and I desperatly hope they can prosecute the person responsible for this.

3

Yeah. The thing about the Essex shooting at the school (for those who don’t know, it was a week or so before school started; a jilted boyfriend came to school and shot his ex-girlfriend who was a teacher there, as well as her mother), is that it wasn’t random. Somehow, I expect that there are going to be angry and/or crazy people in the world who blow up and do bad things to people they know.

When it’s a total stranger who decides that here and now seems like a good time to do some horrible deed to someone else, that’s when my sense of community gets violated, or something.

4

Oh, I definetly know what you mean. I still can’t understand would would drive a person to do that, nor do I want to understand, really.