Bloody Fall

This week my post will be short and somber.  While many of us are getting ready for the holidays, this autumn has been an awful and brutal one for three families that have experienced the unimaginable.

Take a good, hard look at these three pictures.  They are young, beautiful, and vibrant.  Their personalities sparkle in these photos.

And they are all gone.  Taken from us.   Brutally and viciously.  One in New York.  Two in Chicago. 

I don’t know any of them, or their families.  My only connection is that I know the places where each one died.  I know the 7-11 where Akiera Boston was shot.  I have parked in the garage where Ruth George was strangled.  And I have walked the staircase in Morningside Park where Tessa Majors struggled up before she died.  I have been to all those places. 

All three died this fall. 

Look at those faces.

Each one killed,  each more heinously than the next. 

Akiera was 16, and a cheerleader at Simeon high school.  Simeon has a very good public school football team.  Akiera should have had the time of her life, cheering and watching her classmates win football games.  Instead, someone drove up beside the car she was in, fired shots at her boyfriend, missing him but hitting her.  Akiera didn’t get to cheer at one game this fall.   To my knowledge, Akiera’s murderer has not been caught.

Ruth George, 19, a sophomore at UIC was sexually assaulted and strangled in the UIC parking garage by a thug out on parole with an armed robbery conviction.  Ruth was a kinesiology major, and by all accounts, a sweet and caring young woman.  She had previously ignored the suspect’s catcalls.

Perhaps the worst—if there can be such a thing--- was Tessa Majors.  Tessa Majors, a freshman at Barnard, was confronted by three assailants in Morningside Park that wanted her phone and she fought back.  One assailant slashed and stabbed her.  She struggled up the staircase and died.  Two of her assailants were 13 and 14 years old.  They are looking for a third as of this writing.  13 and 14.  Children killing children.

Each one of these news stories punched me in the gut, even though I have no personal connection to any of them.  I can’t imagine the parent receiving that phone call that their daughter is never coming home again.  My heart just aches for each of them.  Three different girls of three different races bright and cheery, just taken from us.

Taken together the murder of these beautiful young women triggers a myriad of questions.  What kind of society are we becoming?  Why can’t we protect these young women?  Who failed them?   Police protection?  The schools they attended?  The criminal justice system?  The parents of the perpetrators?   Something is terribly wrong with a society that cannot protect girls like this. 

Are we so consumed with criminal justice reform that we are willing to accept this as collateral damage?  Do we really believe in Nancy Pelosi’s admonition that in each human there is “a spark of divinity?”  I don’t think there is any divinity in the thug that shot Akiera or the beast that strangled Ruth or even the young punks that stabbed Tessa. 

Please, look at these pictures.  And look again.  And tell me what you see.  And give me your thoughts on how we failed these young women and their families.  How do we keep these soulless animals from our girls?

And just as I drafted this, another 16 year old girl was shot and killed in Little Village here in Chicago. Her picture is posted below the rest.

What have we become?  Why can’t we protect these precious girls?  4 families are going to be without them this holiday season.

I am sick at heart.