Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Susan Powell, a 28-year-old mom in West Valley City, Utah, didn't turn up for work on Monday, and neither did her husband.  By midday, her sister had called police and they had found that the whole family was gone, but Susan's keys, cell phone and car were still at her home.  Around 5 o'clock, her husband turned up with the kids, ages 2 and 4, and said that he had been camping.  He told police that he had last seen his wife about 12:30 that morning, as she was going to bed.  He had then bundled his kids up in the middle of the night and taken them camping in temperatures below 20 degrees and forgotten that it was Monday, not Sunday.

Susan Powell is still missing, and her disappearance is being classified as "suspicious" by law enforcement.  They aren't naming names, but I don't think you have to have a degree in criminal justice to figure out that her husband is a major suspect.  Either he is very odd and innocent, or he is guilty and a very bad liar.  Time will tell.

This story is all over the news today, four days after Susan Powell went missing.  I do not begrudge her the media attention, and I hope it helps to find her.  But I can't help but contrast this situation to the case of the 11 dead women who were found at a single house in Cleveland, Ohio.  In that instance, some of them were gone for months before anyone reported them missing, and some were never reported at all.  Certainly none of them got the kind of media coverage that Susan Powell is getting.

There are some practical reasons for the difference.  Obviously the media will not cover the disappearance of someone who has not been reported missing.  The victims in the Cleveland case were very disproportionately transient, homeless, or prostitutes -- the people who are poorly connected to the rest of society and, frankly, that society doesn't worry too much about.  That makes reporting of their disappearance less likely.

Let's face it, though.  Part of the reason Susan Powell is getting much more coverage than the Cleveland victims all did combined is that she is a white, middle class, young mother.  She is the stuff crime shows are made of.  The victims in Cleveland are the people who we accept, as a society, will go missing -- African-American women engaged in drugs or prostitution or living on the street.  We don't worry about them when they're there, and we don't worry about them when they disappear.

We like to pretend that every human life is precious to us in this country.  These two cases point out that that really isn't true.  We'll prosecute the killers of anyone, yes.  But there are some women on the fringes of society that we won't work too hard to protect.

Two high profile cases are in the news today. The first is the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard, the 11 year old who was kidnapped, raped, and held in a California backyard for 18 years. The second is the discovery of at least 11 women's bodies at a house in Cleveland. If I asked you who is to blame for Dugard's kidnapping, you would probably say her kidnappers are. If I asked you who was to blame for the murders in Cleveland, you would probably pin them on the serial killer. Yet today's coverage points the finger squarely at law enforcement in both cases.

A report from the California Inspector General, which was issued today, says that parole officers had numerous opportunities to discover Dugard during the 10 years they were in charge of supervising her alleged captor. They failed to follow their own procedures in some cases, and in others failed to have decent procedures in the first place. In the Cleveland case, neighbors are coming forward to say that they reported assaults by the alleged perpetrator on their street, and the police did not take them seriously. They also say that there was an odor -- presumably of decomposing bodies -- coming from the property, which was reported but never addressed. At least today, it seems like the answer to whose fault these crimes were is not the perpetrators at all, but law enforcement officials.

So what's going on here? Why have we shifted from outrage at the people who did these things to outrage at the people who didn't catch them? I think what we're seeing is the evolution of people's world view as they try to cope with the horrible things that have occurred.

When the Dugard case first broke, for example, comments on blogs and news sites said things like, "I hope you rot in h*** you sick b*****d." This represented people confronting the idea that there are people out there who do evil things, and we don't know who they are. We heard about the case and conceived of the suspect as sick, twisted, mentally ill, or just plain evil. That scared us, because it seemed so random. If this man could be like this, couldn't anyone? If his neighbors didn't know, do we know about our neighbors?

If there are this sort of person, and/or the alleged murderer in Cleveland, in the world, and if we cannot know who they are, then the world is random. We don't like random. So, as we process these traumatic events, we must move on to the question of how this could have been prevented. If we can't know who is evil, we must rely on those whose job it is to know for us -- the police, the corrections department, etc. We may come to accept that evil people exist, but we don't want to accept that the police can't protect us from them. So now it is their fault.

It's not that there is no logic to investigating what went wrong in these cases. Obviously, we would like to prevent these things from happening again. But in our rush to investigate and prevent, we shouldn't take our eye off the fact that the people most to blame for these crimes are the people who commited them. No one else should suffer solely because we can't accept the randomness of what they did.

Some of my readers have asked why I often don't post ongoing information about investigations into the critical incidents I blog about.  First of all, it's not true that I never update stories.  I posted additional information about the Steve McNair murder/suicide and the Ed Thomas murder, for example.  However, I have not posted available information uncovered by the investigations into the Disney monorail crash or the plane/helicopter crash over the Hudson, as counterexamples.

My rule of thumb is to write an additional post if the new information will fundamentally change or add to the discussion from a crisis response point of view.  In the case of Steve McNair, for example, the information that his death was, indeed, a murder/suicide gave the opportunity to talk about suicide, suicide prevention, and crisis intervention following suicide.

Often, the new information gained in the investigation of an incident tells us who investigators believe is to blame for the incident.  Sometimes the nature of the event is fundamentally changed by this, as it was when we learned that Ed Thomas' alleged murderer was a former student and that he had apparently been prematurely released from psychiatric care.  More often, however, knowing who may be at fault doesn't really change anything except possibly where the blame is being pointed -- and there is always blame.

While this blog is a current events blog, it is a crisis response blog as well.  Feeding blame is not something I, as a crisis responder, believe is particularly useful unless it serves some other purpose, so I choose not to do it.  There are certainly cases where I make the wrong call -- where a piece of information actually really does change the perspective on the event or where I say it does when it doesn't.  We're all human, even us Quarterbacks.

The suspect in the murder of Seaman August Provost III completed a suicide in his cell at Camp Pendleton yesterday. He had been charged on July 23 (and I apologize for not bringing that to you -- I was on an Amtrak train with no internet access).

For those of you just joining this story (feel free to read the previous Quarterbacking on this topic), Provost was standing sentry at Camp Pendleton in the wee hours of June 30 when he was shot and his body set on fire. His family suspected a hate crime, since Provost was either bisexual or homosexual, depending on which article you read, and he had complained to them of being harassed both because of his sexual orientation and because of his race. The Navy said there was no evidence of a hate crime. They also failed to tell his family how he died -- they heard about it on the news.

The official story is that the suspect went on a really bad trip from hallucinogens sometime in May, and it was all downhill from there. He broke into a sailor's home and stole a gun and an xbox, and was pulled over in mid-June for driving while intoxicated. Provost allegedly confronted him as he was trying to set fire to a Navy landing craft, although there was no apparent motive for him wanting to set that fire. The Navy has said it was "part of a crime spree."

And now the suspect is dead. You might think that Provost's family would be glad he was dead -- an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But victims and their families rarely feel that way. They may well want to see the perpetrator put to death, but death without a conviction is symbolically difficult, because it means he will never officially have been punished for what he did. In this instance, the family also will not have the opportunity to find out whether there was a race- or sexuality-based motive. From their point of view, the truth died with the suspect. And I'm sure there are conspiracty theorists out there who find the suicide of the suspect just a little too convenient for the Navy.

I am not one of them. I believe that most people have a conscience, and that living with that conscience when the drugs or the alcohol or the rage wears off is pretty difficult. I have no difficulty believing that this suspect felt he couldn't live with himself. Now his family, as well as the Provost family, are left with the aftermath.

(Two notes on usage: I use the term "completed the act of suicide" or "completed a suicide" because it most accurately describes what happened. If you think about it, "completed" is the natural extension of "attempted," which we commonly use to describe someone who tried to kill him or herself and did not die. The more common "committed suicide" is somewhat euphemistic, and I try whenever possible to use plain language, particularly when dealing with issues around death. I also try to avoid the terms "successful" or "unsuccessful," because they imply that suicide is a goal to be attained, and I never say "took his own life" because, again, that is euphemistic -- where did he take it?

You may also have noticed that I never name suspects or perpetrators in this blog. This represents my value that those who kill others should not in any way be made the center of the story, particularly in a blog about trauma.)

Coverage of the murder of Seaman August Provost III at Camp Pendleton at the end of last month sputtered out basically the minute it got going. It never made the New York Times at all. It continues to be carried largely by the online media, and particularly by websites devoted to African-American and/or Gay communities. Provost's funeral was on Friday, and on Saturday U.S Representative Sheila Jackson Lee called for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding his murder.

To refresh your memory, Provost was murdered while standing sentry. He was shot three times, bound, gagged, and set on fire. He was African-American and, depending on which report your read, either gay or bisexual. He complained of being harassed by fellow service members, and his family believes his murder was a hate crime. The Navy, on the other hand, has said there is no evidence of a hate crime and referred to this murder as a "random act of violence."

The way the Navy has chosen to deal with this situation is unfortunate, and is probably making things worse for both themselves and the family. It turns out that when the Navy notified Seaman Provost's family of his death, they told them he was found unconscious on sentry duty and later died. They failed to mention that he was murdered, let alone share the details. Provost's mother found out he had been shot and burned from the television coverage.

This violates some very, very basic principles of how institutions should behave in a crisis. I wish I could say it was unusual, but unfortunately it is all too common. Institutions -- whether it's a school, the military, a business or the government -- like to clamp down on information. We have this naive notion that all that will become public is what we say, so we don't say much.

But facts exist whether we talk about them or not, and they have a way of making it into the public arena. Instead of asking, "What facts do we want people to have?" institutions should be asking, "If we don't share this fact, how will it look when it does become public." It's almost always better for people to hear bad news immediately, directly and completely.

The two rules I always share with staff in my school and other schools about sharing bad news with children are very simple:

1. Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (which also means no guessing) and
2. Make sure that every known fact they will hear comes from you, and that no rumors do.
   

The minute you violate either of those rules, no matter how well-meaning you are, you lose all trust and credibility, and the same rules go for adults. As soon as it is known that you withheld information, gave inaccurate information or left facts to be revealed by the media or the rumor mill, no one will trust what you say and you will be completely ineffective in being supportive following the incident. People naturally want to blame others following an incident, and you will be the target whether you deserve it or not.

I wonder how this situation would have played out if the Navy had told the family how Seaman Provost died, had acknowledged the possibility of a hate crime even if they didn't think it was one, and had been honest with the Congressman on the base that day. I have to imagine that there would be a whole lot fewer conspiracy theories floating around.