Showing posts with label Annie Le. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Annie Le. Show all posts
Monday, September 21, 2009
Can We Have Our Tragedy Back Now?
Annie Le's body is finally back in her hometown of Placerville, CA, a week after her body was found in the wall of a Yale lab building where she did her research. Services will be private. Her brother, Chris, gave an interview to a local TV station, in which he expressed some frustration with the media:
We just want the media to respect our privacy. We have a lot of stuff to do. This makes it all the much harder.
The Le's have the unenviable task not only of burying a family member who died traumatically, but of trying to sort out this incident that is uniquely theirs while there is an entire country of people who think it belongs to them.
Annie Le's murder captured the attention of media outlets all over the country, and with them all of their readers and viewers. On the day the suspect in her murder was first named, his name was the top most searched term on Google, and at least 3 other of the top 100 were related to Le and the investigation. We all feel like her death is our tragedy.
But it isn't. Most of us had never heard of Annie Le before she went missing, and had she not been killed we never would have. Our fascination with her case has absolutely nothing to do with her as a person, only with the circumstances of her death. And many of us think we are entitled to spout off theories about her and what "really" happened. Rumors run rampant about her killer, whether she had a romantic entanglement with him, what she might have said to put him over the edge, whether he was stalking her, and on and on.
That's not what her family wants to be thinking about right now. They want to deal with their grief and their trauma reactions, and they want to remember her as she was to them. As her brother said,
Make no mistake about it, part of the trauma the Le family has to process now is the trauma of having complete strangers meander through their loved one's life, speculating, intruding, and saying any foolish thing that comes into their head. When they ask for privacy, they aren't just asking us to stop trying to interview them. They're asking for us to stop talking about this incident like we know anything because, from their point of view, we certainly don't.She lived a good life. we want to respect that and have others respect that as well.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Violence on Campus
It's another Quarterback Truth-Telling Moment. What do you assume this post is going to be about? What current event comes to mind when you hear "violence on campus?" I'm guessing that, for those of you who have an answer, you're thinking about the murder of Annie Le, the Yale pharmacology graduate student. It's all over the news, with new suspicions and breaking stories several times a day. I blogged about it myself twice in one day this weekend.
Actually, the story that caught my attention this morning was the murder of Juan Carlos Rivera at about 9 AM at Coral Gables High School in Florida. I thought this would be big news, but it disappeared off the major news sites basically as fast as it appeared, and it made me wonder why. Why is the murder of Annie Le, and adult in a relatively large city, more newsworthy than that of Juan Carlos Rivera, a teenager in an suburban high school? In fact, the Internet community itself is debating a very similar question as we speak -- is the murder of Annie Le a big enough event to merit its own Wikipedia page, or is it just a flash in the pan.
My first hypothesis on this was that murder on college campuses is significantly less frequent than murder on K-12 campuses. A little rummaging turns up the fact that in 2004 (the most recent statistics I could find for both years) there were 15 homicides on college campuses in the United States, while in the 2003-2004 school year there were 22 homicides at K-12 schools. So yes, murder in a K-12 school is more rare, but not by much, and not when you consider that the total student population of colleges is significantly smaller than the student population of K-12 schools. This doesn't seem like the answer.
Part of the answer, I think, is that American society is quite captivated with weddings, what happens before weddings and what happens after them. The fact that Annie Le disappeared a few days before her wedding caught our attention, and once we were paying attention to the mystery, we weren't going to let it go. Part of the answer is probably also the mystique of an Ivy League College and an obviously bright victim.
Still, we as a society are usually really interested in school violence. The murder of Juan Carlos Rivera hit the national news this morning, I think, because it played to our deepest fears about our children's safety in school. The problem is that as soon as the press got more information about this murder, the victim suddenly didn't seem the innocent schoolchild we envision when we think about school violence. It turns out that Rivera was in a fight, reportedly over a girl, and the other student pulled out a box cutter and stabbed him. That defies our idea of what "school violence" is -- when we get scared about it, we get scared about random mass shootings and people from the outside coming in, not about fights.
More than that, though, we tend to have this idea that if someone is killed in a fight at a school, it must be at a school that is "used to" this kind of violence. While certainly there is more violence at some schools than at others, I don't think any school is "used to" students killing each other. Keep in mind, only about 20 kids in the whole country die this way each year. Violent death at a school where you work or study violates the generally true premise that school is a safe place and that the adults in a school can keep children safe. Keep in mind that children are twice as likely to be victims of a violent crime when they are not at school as they are at school.
Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, Juan Carlos Rivera is not the quintessential "sympathetic victim" our society rallies around. He is male. He appears to have been somewhat violent himself, at least today. And, yes, he is Latino. And our gut intuitions about some schools being "used to" violence pales in comparison to what we assume to be true of violence in Latino communities. Few would have such a thought consciously, but that underlying racist assumption is reinforced daily in popular culture. Consciously or not, the press began with "this is big, a student was killed at school" and quickly reverted to "it was a Latino boy in a fight, that's not news."
At the end of the day, the Le family and the Rivera family have empty seats at their tables. Whether one victim is "sympathetic" or "deserved it" is really an offensive question. Their families don't deserve to be without their children, period.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Update: Annie Le
Earlier today I blogged about Annie Le, the Yale grad student who went missing five days before her wedding. I wrote about how hard it is to respond to an incident that does not have a clear end to it.
As you may have already heard, a body presumed to be Le was found in the walls of the building where she was last seen. Now the incident has an end, and the hard work of dealing with it falls to her fiance, family and friends. I wish them well, and send my deepest sympathies.
Annie Le's Wedding Day: Who Could We Help, and How?
Yale pharmacology graduate student Annie Le was supposed to get married today. Instead, her fiance is in New Haven, trying to help law enforcement officials figure out where she is and what happened to her. She was last seen outside the Yale medical school on Tuesday. Her keys, purse and cell phone were all left in her office. She doesn't have a car. Friday brought word that a Professor whose class she was to take Tuesday afternoon, and who canceled class abruptly on that day, was being interviewed. Evidence was removed from the med school building yesterday, and unofficial, unconfirmed reports say that evidence was bloody clothing found in the drop ceiling of the lab in which she worked. Police say they don't think she ran away.
This has got to be gut-wrenching for her fiance, family and friends. The twists and turns are coming quickly, but no resolution is in sight. While everything I've detailed here is true, it's entirely possible some or all of it is irrelevant. The reports regarding the clothes could be false, or they aren't hers. The Professor could have gotten the stomach flu. Clues give hope for figuring this out, but they don't make the waiting much easier.
From a crisis response point of view, this is also incredibly tricky. It's not that no one needs help, it's that it's not at all clear who we should be supporting or how we would go about doing it. We're supposed to respond after the event is over. This one isn't, but it's in a new stage. We've moved from "she'll turn up" to "something happened to her," but we don't know that for sure and we don't know what it was. We also don't know if she's alive. And worse, it could be we will never know. At what point do we decide that it's time to help out anyway? Or is this one of those incidents when help will never come, because there will never be a time we can say it's over?
What particularly gives me the creeps, however, is the notion that if, at some point, we decided it was time to try to offer some early crisis intervention to those affected -- and there have to be a lot of them, including everyone who goes to school or works there -- there is a significant possibility we'd be working with the person or persons responsible for her disappearance. Now, there are times when working with the person responsible for an event is more than appropriate. I'm thinking, for example, of the person who ran a red light and caused a fatal car accident. But there, their level of culpability is out in the open. Here, we'd be working with someone who is simply lying to us. And the thought that there would be the remotest possibility of learning something during the course of the intervention that the police did not already know is horrifying. We promise confidentiality, but privilege has not been established. I don't want to be in that position.
All this, I suppose, is why you wait until the event is over to respond. It's just much easier to do that when the event has a clear beginning, middle and end. The current endless middle is hard for us. It has to be a zillion times harder for Annie Le's friends and family and the Yale community. I hope they get their resolution soon, and I hope against hope that she comes home safe.
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Meet the Quarterback
- Naomi Zikmund-Fisher
- is a clinical social worker, former school Principal and a Crisis Consultant for schools and community organizations. You can learn more about her at www.SchoolCrisisConsultant.com
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