Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Yesterday afternoon, a branch fell off a tree just outside the seal lion exhibit at the Central Park Zoo in New York.  It was not windy or raining, and no one really knows why it fell.  About thirty feet below, Gianna Ricciutti, aged six months, was having her picture taken by her father, Mike, while being held by her mother, Karla Del Gallo. It was part of a visit from their home in New Jersey.  The branch hit Gianna and her mother, leaving Gianna dead and Karla in critical condition.

This is the sort of story that makes you gasp and exclaim how awful it is.  The sheer randomness of this event, coupled with the death of a tiny child, seems especially horrible.  As we start to think about it, we wonder why it doesn't happen more often.  After all, parks are full of tall trees, and branches fall off trees, so it was just a matter of time, we suppose, before this happened. And if it happened once, it can happen again.

If that's how we feel, imagine what it would be like to be just outside sea lion exhibit at the Central Park Zoo and suddenly hear a loud noise and see a woman and her baby crushed by a falling tree limb.  Gianna's father witnessed his baby's death and his wife's serious injury, completely powerless to stop it.  There were certainly others, perhaps not as focused on that particular pair, who saw the accident or arrived shortly thereafter. 

A security guard at the scene was interviewed by the New York Times.  The Times reports his experience as,

he heard a loud crack, like a thunderclap, and saw the branch plummet. After the mother fell, members of her family shrieked, the guard said, and her husband began screaming and jumping around. “He was going crazy,” the guard said.

The phrase "going crazy" really bothers me in this context.  First of all, what, exactly, is our expectation for rational behavior when you have just seen two of the most important people in your life critically injured in a freak accident?  How do we expect this man to act under the circumstances?  Is screaming and jumping around really that odd?

The second problem I have with this description is that the number one thing I talk to people who have been traumatized about is the sense they have that they are going crazy.  I would say that at least 80% of what I do is assure people that there reactions are typical and understandable.  They are not crazy, the situation is.  Behavior and reactions that would be totally bizarre on a regular day or in reaction to regular stress make total sense when the world has turned upside down.

At the same time, I can't blame the guard too much.  He just witnessed something awful as well, and frankly I wish the press wasn't so eager to get quotes from people in situations like this.  I doubt very much that the security guard actually thinks Mike Ricciutti's reaction was so out of whack.  He was describing the scene, and he used a turn of phrase that was unfortunate.  Under the circumstances, I can more than forgive him.

I really hope everyone who was in that part of the park yesterday gets some support.  It's going to be hard to walk under trees for a while, not because trees really are, statistically, all that dangerous, but because they seem that way.  I also hope all of those people have a chance to talk to each other at some point.  They need to know they aren't crazy, that this really was awful, and that the others around them didn't think their reaction was nuts.  It's easy, at moments like this, to feel like you're the only one reacting the way you are.  It might help them to know that others are gasping and exclaiming how awful it is, too.

The first of six defendants was convicted today in the murder of three young adults in Newark, New Jersey three years ago and the attempted murder of a fourth.  The dead, Iofemi Hightower, 20; Terrance Aeriel, 18; and Dashon Harvey, 20; and the survivor, Natasha Aeriel, 19, were all students or soon-to-be-students at Delaware State University, were hanging out on a Newark school playground when they were attacked with guns and machetes.  At least one of the female victims was sexually assaulted.

These murders are widely referred to as the "Newark Schoolyard Murders."  They got a fair amount of attention when they happened, and the Associated Press says they

jolted New Jersey's largest city into trying to fix its crime problem.

I find this an interesting phenomenon.  Clearly this is not the only homicide Newark has ever seen.  There were 106 homicides in Newark the year that these killings took place.  What made these stand out?

While there is plenty that is fairly typical about these murders, they also have particular aspects that propel them to the top of the front page.  First of all, while people in Newark might have come to expect homicides by the time these occurred in August of 2007, there were some caveats.  Generally speaking, there was one victim at a time, killed by one or two perpetrators.  There was gang violence, but it usually killed other gang members.  The number of murders involving unknown assailants and random violence was still a tiny percentage.  In this instance, the murders happened in a low crime part of town, relatively speaking, and the victims were college students, not gang bangers.  The motive appears to have been initiating a new gang member, with robbery as an afterthought.  In short, these murders violated all of the basic worldviews that allow people to think of violence as something that happens to other people.  If these kids could be killed, anyone could.

I think that the factor that most tipped the scales in favor of massive publicity, however, was that the killings took place in a schoolyard.  When you read the term "schoolyard murders," your first thought is probably about school children being killed, perhaps by other students.  We as a society are obsessed with school violence despite lots of evidence that school is one of the safest places for children in this country.  Sending our kids to school takes a leap of faith, because we as parents can't watch over them, so murders in schools are a big deal.  In this instance, even though it was nighttime, summer, and neither the victims nor the killers were students at the school, the simple use of the term "schoolyard murders" triggers a visceral response, and we want to learn more.

Certainly these young people did not deserve to die like this.  No one does.  And to the extent that this event was a catalyst for change, that's all to the good.  It's important to remember, though, that 103 other people were murdered in Newark that year.  Not all of them were minding their own business, not all were college students, not all happened to have been killed on a school playground.  All 106 murder victims were human beings who had people who cared about them.  As the coverage of this and the remaining trials hits the news, let's take a moment to remember them, too.