if we just have the information, every fact categorized and indexed, gathered and preserved in exquisite detail, then we will understand and once we understand, we will be safe.
our criminal justice system is organized around the mistaken belief that everything can and should be explained, that there is inherent value in examining every aspect of a done deed.
and the character of our criminal justics system is a reflection of the character of the country. it appears more and more to me as if the true american dream is not one of prosperity and happiness, but an eternal yearning for the one thing that cannot be had in this life: guaranteed safety.
life is not safe, and nothing any body or institution does or says can change that. it doesn’t matter how carefully you live. the father of a good friend of mine, years ago, drowned in three inches of slow-drain bathtub water after falling off a stepladder while trying to change a lightbulb. is there a lesson in that? never change lightbulbs if there’s no one else around? or when there’s water in the tub?
this happened in santo domingo, and i don’t believe the authorities found it necessary to perform an autopsy. you find the old gent face-down in the tub, broken lightbulb in hand, stepladder tipped on its side. it doesn’t take a coroner or a detective to figure out the situation. yet if the exact same thing happened in exactly the same way in the US, there would be an investigation, an inquest, an autopsy. who knows, maybe the family would be encouraged to sue the manufacturer of the stepladder. or the plumber who didn’t quite fix that slow drain… and so on.
i see that as a form of insanity, and believe that our collective acceptance of it costs this culture dearly. it is insanity to view every abrupt or untimely death as preventable, and to act accordingly, yet that is what we routinely do.
and it is insanity to believe that everything happens for a reason, a reason that can be found, if only you work hard enough at the task.
how else to explain our obsessive need to autopsy the murdered family of devan kalathat? an infant is shot in the head with a gun. the infant dies. nothing is gained from subsequently slicing that poor baby open to chart the exact trajectory of the bullet, its angle, its approximate speed of entry, the precise bits of bone and blood vessel destroyed by its passing. yet this is just what is being done, to all of devan’s victims and to devan himself.
why? what do we hope to gain as a result of all these tests, the sheaves of unbearable photos and documentation?
a police spokeman in santa clara said yesterday:
“what happened” is already known: devan shot most of his family to death, then shot himself.
there’s no explaining it, no matter how deep and hard the authorities dig, there’s not going to be a straight line from some complicated personal interaction to the bullets coming out of his newly-purchased guns.
sometimes there are no answers. sometimes, people just snap. and all our analysis around it is nothing more than a frantic (and expensive) attempt to explain the event in terms that boil down to “don’t worry, it couldn’t happen to you”.
but it could happen to you. it could happen to anybody. you could be the one with the shiny new gun in your hand and a toddler’s forehead in the crosshairs. or the now-familyless wife in critical condition. you could be the viejo drowned in his own bathtub on a saturday afternoon. you could have worked on the 97th floor of the world trade center.
unless, of course, disease, a drunken driver, an untended toenail infection, avalanche or a loose street grate get you first. but let any one of these things kill someone, and it will be investigated ad nauseum, the already-obvious documented and archived forever.
we are all going to die, like it or not, sooner or later, one way or another. death is not preventable. no way, no how, as my dad would say. a million years ago we had to worry about getting eaten up by dinosaurs. or dying from an abscessed tooth. hell, just being nearsighted guaranteed you a very short life back in the days of the hunter-gatherers. so we grew up and the dinosaurs died off, and we built these little houses that grew into these little communities, and we seeded our farmland with wheat and milked the cows and fed the chickens. barred our doors against lions and tigers and bears, built rifles and leg-traps and beat those scary wild animals at their own game.
still we are not safe.
and we do far more harm than good with all this in-depth scrutiny. for example, i don’t believe the coroner benefits from autopsying a murdered infant. i believe that’s a very difficult assignment for him (or her) and all the assistants participating in the gruesome task. they go home with images in their mind that they did not have before but will now carry around forever. experience transforms people (isn’t that why we’re trying so hard to find out what the supposed problems were between devan and his brother-in-law? because that experience contributed to what ultimately happened?) yet we regularly and unnecessarily subject our specialists — whether coroners, cops, lawyers, members of the jury — to experiences that do not benefit them nor serve any other rational purpose.
what if, after spending a day autopsying bullet-riddled babies, the coroner’s assistant goes home and hangs herself? what do we investigate then? i’m not suggesting that all autopsies are beside the point and should be abolished. there are situations where information from an autopsy could lead to the identification (and hopefully the subsequent capture) of a violent human being. there are mystery deaths that must be examined if only to set the family’s fears and concerns to rest, so that they don’t spend the rest of their own lives wondering.
no such benefits can result from the autopsies presently being performed on the extended kalathat family. the perpetrator is known and no longer able to harm anyone. the cause of the deaths is known. there are no mysteries to be cleared up other than the eternally unclearable mystery of why he did it, and i guarantee you that answer will not be found printed on the internal organs of his victims.
i don’t share lieutentant cooke’s fervent hope that devan’s wife survives her injuries. she herself, if she is conscious enough to understand what has happened, may not wish to survive. i wouldn’t.
some things are worse than dying.
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very powerful blog with equally powerful points.
“coroner” is an interesting word, deriving from the Latin word for “crown,” meaning the monarch of England and still used in kingless America. “The person holding the office of coroner, a position dating from the 12th century, was charged with keeping local records of legal proceedings in which the crown had jurisdiction. He helped raise money for the crown by funneling the property of executed criminals into the king’s treasury. The coroner also investigated any suspicious deaths among the Normans, who as the ruling class wanted to be sure that their deaths were not taken lightly.” (Online dictionary)
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