Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Everything about this story is wrong.

Based on as yet very sketchy reports, here's what we know:

An 8th grader at Cummings Middle School in Brownsville, Texas, showed a gun in the hallways at school this morning. Police were called. They ordered him to drop the gun. He didn't. He appeared to aim it at them. They shot him. He died. The gun turns out to have been an air pellet gun.

When I say that everything about this is wrong, I don't mean to imply it's not true. It's just wrong. It doesn't fit the model of a good day at middle school, certainly, but it doesn't even fit the model of a bad day. A kid is either armed or he's not -- none of this pellet gun stuff. He either wants to die and kills himself or doesn't and puts down the gun. The violence is either threatened or real. This entire episode occupies this weird no-man's land between the possibilities our brains know how to deal with.

Given that , perhaps it's not surprising that everything about the press coverage is wrong, too. The headlines read things like, "Brownsville police kill teen at middle school." While technically accurate, it sure leaves a lot of important information out.

Whose fault is this? The kid, for bringing the gun in the first place and refusing to drop it and aiming it towards police? The police for shooting when the kid wasn't actually lethally armed? The school for calling the police? The parents for this kid having access to the pellet gun in the first place?

I don't think I've ever seen a case that both so clearly begs you to blame someone and so clearly illustrates why blame gets in the way of healing. Now that this incident is over, we can all point to numerous places people "should" have done things differently. But by "should," we mean "if they had, this probably would have had a different outcome." That's really different than saying that the outcome is their fault. It's so easy to confuse "should have" with "I wish they would have" or even "next time, I hope they don't."

This happened. Period. It will never have not happened. Everyone involved in it has to make peace with that fact. While preventing it in the future may be a priority, accepting it as part of the past has to happen, too. The messy question of whose fault it was can only get in the way of that process.

Thursday night, Shannon Stone, 39, was at the baseball game with his 6 year-old son. The Rangers were playing the A's, and Stone wanted a foul ball. He yelled to Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton that he wanted the next ball. When a foul came Hamilton's way, he turned and tossed it towards Stone in the stands. Stone, a firefighter with the Brownwood Fire Department, reach out to get it and fell out of the stands head first, 14 feet. He was injured but talking and asked rescue workers to check on his son. Then he had a heart attack and died.

If you go to the ABC website, you can see the video of the fall, but not the landing. Stone fell behind a barrier, and was therefore not visible from the field or the stands aside from right near where it happened. The video is horrifying enough if you know how the story ends.

I was pleased to read today that counseling has been offered to the Rangers players and, specifically, to Josh Hamilton. Hamilton asked after Stone after the fall and was told he was awake and talking. He didn't find out that Stone was dead until after the game. Apparently Hamilton is a recovering addict, which will make bouncing back from this event even harder. Unfortunately, when we're under extreme stress we tend to act in our most ingrained and familiar ways. If you're an addict, that addiction is almost as automatic as breathing, and under stress it tends to rear its ugly head.

This is one of those stories that just isn't "supposed" to happen. Taking your kid to the ballgame is about as wholesome as it gets. So immediately, we start looking for someone to blame. If it's someone's fault, then this isn't just a horrible freakish outcome of perfectly reasonable actions on everyone's part. If someone's to blame, somehow the rest of us are safer.

In this case, the Rangers, following a fall by a fan last year, had their railings looked at and pronounced up to code and safe. Hamilton was indulging a fan wanting a ball for his kid, something in other circumstances we would say makes Hamilton a great role model. Stone was doing what fans do, and if you look at the video it doesn't even look like he was reaching unreasonably far to do it. No one did things wrong, and yet this situation is terribly wrong.

Going to the game won't be any more dangerous this weekend than it was last, when I took my own 6 year-old to a game. But boy, it sure feels like it.

On February 24, a kitchen fire destroyed a home day care in Houston, Texas, killing four children and injuring the other three there. All were less than three years old. The day care operator was unharmed, which is not surprising given that surveillance video shows she was shopping at Target when the fire started. She has since fled the country.

The death of a child -- any child -- for any reason is horrific. Incidents involving children are one of the types of traumatic events that automatically trigger the response of a Critical Incident Stress Management team in many fire and police departments simply because the chances are so big that the first responders will be seriously emotionally impacted by them. Children aren't "supposed" to die. That's how we believe the world works, and when they do die it shakes us up.

This event, of course, is made infinitely worse by the fact that it appears to be directly caused by someone's negligence. As much as we believe children don't die, we also believe that everyone protects children. And we certainly believe that people whose job it is to protect children at least try. If the death of a child in a car accident shakes up our worldview, the death of a child due to the gross negligence of a caregiver explodes it.

Or does it? When children are killed by their parents we are horrified, but we are not, at least from a distance, as traumatized. That's because when parents kill their children, most of us analyze the situation and judge that our own children are safe. We know that the same thing won't happen to our family because we know we will not murder our children. It's horrible, but it's easily prevented.

Which brings us around to this particular situation. Those of us with children in day care or school drop our children off each day and leave them with others who act in loco parentis, meaning "in the place of the parents." We give those caregivers the right and the responsibility to behave as parents to our children, and we believe that those caregivers will do at least a rough approximation of what we would do with regards to our kids and their well-being.

Those of us who work in schools or day cares, on the other hand, know that sometimes the expectations of parents can be unreasonable. When something goes wrong and the parents are not present, they are likely to blame us, even if, in reality, they would have done the exact same thing we did. If a child is playing in their back yard and falls and breaks their arm, the parents feel bad but recognize it as an accident. If it happens on the playground at school, they are much more likely to blame the school staff. That's because we confuse acting in loco parentis with preventing all harm to children. The former is the law. The latter is impossible.

But in this case, it wasn't impossible. Could this fire have started had the day care provider been with the children? Quite possibly. Fires happen. It could have happened in a child's home, too. Could one or more of the children have been injured or killed in such a situation? Also possible. Kids are hurt in fires under the best of circumstances. Despite our best efforts, children die.

But this wasn't the day care provider's best efforts. We will never know if that fire would have started had she been doing her job, or whether the kids would have survived it if it did. She didn't try. When we drop our kids off at day care, we do so with the belief that the person acting in loco parentis is a responsible person. We wouldn't leave them if we didn't believe that. I can only imagine the horror of finding out this way that you were wrong.

Jonathan Foster was a 12-year-old boy living with his mother in Houston.  Two weeks ago, a family friend and her child moved in after the friend separated from her husband.  Last Friday, Jonathan stayed home alone while his mom and her new roommate both worked.  When his mother came home, he was gone.  Initially, it seemed like Jonathan might have run away from home, but on Tuesday his body was found, burnt, in a ditch.  An acquaintance of the roommate has been arrested and charged with his murder.

I can't imagine anyone reads a story like this and thinks anything positive.  This is not a feel good news story.  There are some of you out there who read this and think something like, "that's too bad" and move on.  There are others who read this and feel a punch in your stomach.  I am definitely of the latter category.

So, am I an inherently more sensitive person?  Am I morally superior because I notice and care?  Am I weaker, because I am more easily affected?  Is it a female thing?  I'll say it's "none of the above."

This story punches me in the gut for the simple reason that I have a 12-year-old child of my own.  Sometimes she stays home alone while I work.  We have gone over and over various safety rules for when she's alone, and I believe she follows them.  I also recognize, however, that Jonathan probably broke the one that's hardest to remember -- don't open the door for an unexpected visitor even if you know them.  Even if you know them.  It's easy to say in theory, but how may 12-year-olds would find it easy to keep the door closed if the neighbor, an aunt, or a family friend stopped by?  There's the rule, and then there's common courtesy.

I feel a punch in the gut because there is nothing in this story that makes me believe this could not happen to my family.  There is no, "I would never let my child do that" or "My child would never do that" for me to fall back on.  What separates my family from Jonathan Foster's family is depending on how you look at it, dumb luck or the fact that, as far as I know, I'm not acquainted with anyone who would kidnap and burn my child.  That I know of.  I'm sure Jonathan's mother thought the same thing.

Our minds are wired to look for patterns in stories like this.  We look for signals that can help us either know how to prevent such an incident from happening to us or can help convince us that it couldn't happen to us.  The punch in the gut isn't from being caring or sensitive or weak or female.  It's the result of the realization, conscious or not, that the signals, rather than protect or reassure us, are telling us we can't prevent this at all.

A 30-year-old woman in Irving, Texas called 911 on Monday and told dispatchers she had just murdered her two children, ages 2 and 5.  A tape of the phone call records the mother saying that she tried to poison them with bathroom cleaner and strangled them with a wire when they refused to drink it.  One child died later that day at the hospital, and another died late Tuesday.  In her phone call, the mother says that she killed her children because they were autistic, and she wanted normal children.

This horrific case has enough layers in it to seemingly match any agenda of any commentator or blog writer anywhere.  In searching for information about the case, I have found a great deal of commentary from organizations supporting families with autistic children, talking about the level of stress that parents are under.  I have also found a smattering of people bemoaning the fact that this mother will almost certainly plead insanity.  Then there are your death penalty advocates, and your assorted anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant types.

I will not pretend to know what brought this woman to do what she did.  This case is horrible no matter how you analyze it.  And while I may have opinions on some of the political issues that others have raised, in the absence of any real information about how this case may more may not relate to those I will keep them to myself.

That is not to say, however, that I don't have a proverbial horse in this race.  One of my first thoughts upon hearing about this is to wonder what I would say to my own children if they heard about it.  I have no interest in exposing them to this news, and there is no reason to.  But kids hear and see things that we don't mean for them to know about all the time.  What would you tell a child who asked why this woman killed her children?

Let's start with what a child who asks about this is really asking.  If your child is old enough to read or to comprehend a verbal news broadcast, then he or she already has the facts, such as we know them, about this case before asking about it.  And yet, kids still ask.  It's not that they're forgetful or simpleminded, it's just that they don't have the words to ask what they really want to know.  They are not asking why she did this in an attempt to find out why she said she did it (i.e. that her children were disabled).  They are asking what we all are asking, which is a more global, "How on earth could anyone do this?"  On top of that, they are asking for some idea of whether the notion of a mother killing her children makes sense to us.  They want some help gauging just how common this is, which in turn helps them gauge just how likely it is to happen to them.

In the words of one of my mentors, when children ask questions we need to listen to the melody, not just the lyrics.  If your child asks you why this woman killed her children, here are a few things you might think about saying:

• I don't know.  It's hard to imagine how someone could do that, and it's very upsetting to hear about.
• She must have been more upset than I or anyone I have ever met has ever been to do something like that.  I have never even thought about doing anything even close to that, and I never would.
  
• Nobody really knows.  However, I would guess that she had an illness in her mind that made her think that was an OK thing to do.  I'm sure that if she had a healthy mind, she would not think it was OK.
• That is a really scary story, isn't it?  One of the reasons it's on the news is that things like that are so unusual that it gets everyone's attention.  We are hearing all about this story, but let's not forget that it's something that's really, really, really unlikely.

Kids need to know that we take their questions seriously, that we will answer them when we can, that we will admit when we can't, and that we will try to help them with the feelings that motivate their questions even when they can't quite put them into words.  And then, when we're done, we can slip back to adult company and admit, amongst ourselves, that the question of "why" is still bothering us, too.

Police officer Craig Shaw of Lancaster, Texas, about 20 miles south of Dallas, was shot and killed on Sunday while responding to a shooting at a local housing complex.  Another officer returned fire, killing the suspect, who had, in turn, shot Jeremy McMillan.  The shooter turns out to be the son of Dallas Police Chief David Brown, and McMillan appears to have been targeted at random.  His two young children were in the car with him when he was shot, and emerged covered in their father's blood but unhurt.

We know that the death of a police officer in the line of duty represents a major and complicated critical incident.  Even for those in law enforcement in other jurisdictions, line of duty deaths can be very personal and very traumatic.  The death of Officer Shaw would probably have an impact -- possibly a big one -- on Chief Brown by itself.  The death of his son obviously would, by itself, as well.  And the notion that his son killed someone, too, would be a big deal.  Now Chief Brown has all of these things to contend with at once.

Last week, I spent some of this space trying to get inside the mind of a mother whose daughter killed her son.  While Chief Brown's situation isn't exactly the same, it's not far off.  When someone you love commits murder, it severely tests what you believe about family loyalty.  It's hard to be "loyal" to a family member who has done something so awful, but it takes a big person to reach out to the family of the victim in this situation.  When the victim is themselves someone you care deeply about, your loyalties are torn even further.  And when your loved one, the one who committed murder, is dead themselves, it's hard to know which way to turn.

It's both important and very difficult to remember that, while Chief Brown's son may be at fault for this entire situation, Chief Brown himself is not, nor is his family.  People never know what to say when tragedy strikes a family.  That is only compounded many times over in this situation.  The tendency will be for people to put their energies elsewhere, figuring that comforting the Shaws and the McMillans are much more important than comforting the family of a murderer.  However, this is as much of a tragedy for the Browns as for the two other families. 

We don't like morally ambiguous situations.  We want it to be the case that either we are glad that the shooter is dead or we're not.  If we're reflective in this situation, however, most people will come to the conclusion that there are two conflicting truths in this situation.  The first is that the shooter's death was necessary to prevent further violence (and some of us might say he got what he deserved).  The second is that the death of Chief Brown's son is a terrible loss to his family.  It's hard to hold those two things in our minds at the same time.  I hope enough people close to the Chief can do so to provide comfort and support following this awful incident.

Before this week, Jerry Joseph had a pretty good life.  He was a 16-year-old basketball star at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas -- the high school where Friday Night Lights takes place.  This week, however, he was arrested three separate times.  It turns out that Jerry Joseph is actually Guerdwich Montimer*, and he is 22 years old.  He was arrested first on a misdemeanor charge of failing to identify himself to a police officer, next for falsifying his birth certificate, and today for sexual assault.  It turns out that last summer Montimer had sex with his high school girlfriend, who was 15 at the time and thought he was too.

Most people understand that sexual assault of any kind is traumatic to the victim.  We as a society have come a very long way since the not-so-distant past where "date rape" was not recognized as being "real" rape, for example.  We understand that rape and other forms of sexual assault do not have to be a stranger dragging someone into the bushes, but can involve alcohol or drugs, underage victims, and/or romantic partners or spouses.

This case raises an interesting issue, however.  Montimer's girlfriend consented to the sex at the time (although in Texas you can't legally consent to sex if you're under 17).  Chances are she did not feel traumatized at the time, and probably didn't between then and this week, either.  Because of her age she may well have experienced long-term effects of this experience, but in the immediate she was probably OK.  This week, however, she is definitely not OK. 

So what changed?  The only difference between then and now is that then she thought the boy was her age, and now she knows he wasn't.  Why should that make such a difference?  What happened hasn't changed -- only what she knows about what happened.

It does make a difference.  We experience our lives not just based on the straightforward facts of what happens as we perceive them in real time, but also through our understanding of what those events mean.  We are constantly interpreting the world and processing what impact events have on our identities, our sense of self worth or safety, and about a zillion other things. 

The physical facts of what happened to the girlfriend haven't changed, but her understanding of what that means have changed radically.  She now knows that she was manipulated by a significantly older person -- an adult -- who got her to consent by lying.  She knows she would not have consented if she had known.  She knows that, while she wasn't aware at the time of the inherent power differential that was caused by him being an adult, he was, and he used it to his advantage.  Using a power differential to get sex is a crime, and that's why he was arrested. 

This constitutes sexual assault just as having sex with someone who is too drunk to know what is going on is sexual assault.  If they wouldn't consent if they had all the facts (and could process them lucidly), the sex is not consensual.  When they "come to," either by sobering up or by finding out you lied, they are going to be traumatized, and the person who got them drunk or lied to them or manipulated them in any way will  be looking at jail time.

* As you know, I don't usually identify perpetrators by name.  In this instance, it was relatively difficult to tell the story in an understandable way without doing so, so I've made an exception.

photo copyright istockphoto/Stockphoto4u

A man with years of tax troubles and disputes with the IRS crashed a small plane into the building that houses the IRS office in Austin, Texas this morning.  Two people were injured and one is unaccounted for.  It's not clear from the current coverage what happened to the pilot, although it seems likely that he is dead.  Before crashing the plane, he had set fire to his home and left a six page letter/blog on the Internet explaining his actions.

Authorities have announced that this appears to be an isolated incident and that there is no ongoing threat.  The Department of Homeland Security released a statement that said,

We do not yet know the cause of the plane crash.  At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity. We continue to gather more information, and are aware there is additional information about the pilot's history.

Press coverage has also emphasized the description of this as a suicide, and most outlets are referring to his writing as a suicide note and using words like "rambling" and "incoherent" to describe it.

I find this spin absolutely fascinating.  Towards the end of his letter, the pilot wrote,

It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country. . . . I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. . . . I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored.

If you read his writing all the way through (you can download it here), you will disagree with his conclusions but you will not find it hard to understand at all.  It is not incoherent.  He is very clear that he is angry at the government, why he is angry at the government, and that he is about to do this to draw attention to his grievances, cause other people to pay attention to his thinking and inspire others to also kill themselves in similar attacks.

Let's suppose you didn't know anything about this story.  Suppose someone told you that a man, angry at the United States government and believing that its citizens should rise up against it, killed himself by flying an airplane into a building housing a government office.  He left behind writing detailing his belief that the government is corrupt and encouraging others to similarly die for the cause of freedom.  What is your mental image?  Mine is not of a computer engineer.  It's of a terrorist.

So why does DHS say this isn't terrorism?  And why is the media reporting it as an incoherent suicide?  Why does it seem so important to portray this person as crazy, while others, such as the Fort Hood shooter, are terrorists? 

The practical difference is that this man has no links to any organized group that anyone can tell.  When DHS says this isn't terrorism, they really mean this isn't organized terrorism, and they are right.  There is also, frankly, and element of religious and/or racial profiling.  Terrorists are Muslim and come from the Middle East, southern Asia or Northern Africa.  Americans can't be terrorists.

The other reason it's important to us to maintain this distinction, however, is that it makes us feel safe.  We have an image of terrorists that is truly frightening and represents an ongoing danger.  The thing that keeps us from being scared out of our minds is that, for the most part, we believe them to be "over there" and not here.  Those who may be here fit a certain profile and hence are easy to catch.

This pilot, on the other hand, isn't "over there."  If he's a terrorist, then there's a much greater risk of terrorism than we would like to think about.  There is no way to keep them out, because they're already in, and there is no way to figure out who they are.  So we tell ourselves that this guy was crazy and suicidal.  We know such people exist, and even that there is some danger from them, but they don't represent anything near the threat that terrorists do.  They are isolated incidents.

A certain amount of psychological self-preservation is a reasonable thing.  We do all sorts of things to prevent ourselves from being paralyzed by fear, and that is what allows us to function.  Sometimes, however, it pays to take a step back and ask whether we are protecting ourselves from fear or simply being oblivious to the truth.