CHRISTINA HOYT, MANUEL TOBOADA, CHRISTI POWELL, SONJA LARSON, TRACY PAULES: WE REMEMBER.
TO SEE INTRODUCTORY REMARKS, JUMP BACK TO THE FLATLAND ALMANACK.
I was living in Gainesville, Florida at the time those five students were brutally murdered. I was afraid. Everyone was afraid. No one knew how the killer or killers had managed to get in to the apartments of the victims---apartments where all of us had friends--and we knew that the killer or killers had managed to kill a very powerful young man, Manuel Toboada. It wasn't only the girls who were afraid.
We had two days of waking up to reports of grisly killings. We were given just enough detail to know that the killer or killers had been systematic and brutal. We didn't know when they would stop and we didn't know what to do to protect ourselves. Parents didn't know how to protect their children. The police wouldn't release details for fear of compromising their investigation. It was a bad, sorrowful, and terrifying time. A number of parents took their children out of school.
Nobody ordered pizza anymore or accepted gifts of flowers. We wouldn't open our doors to sign for UPS packages; we insisted on having them left at the door. Services involving the delivery of food or flowers were suddenly no longer in demand. Nobody would risk opening the door to strangers. People who shouldn't have owned guns bought them; a friend of mine said a guy who lived next door to her apartment fired a handgun by accident and the bullet came through her wall. We were all afraid.
That was 16 years ago, and I don't get back there very often, but if you drive along 34th Street in Gainesville, you'll see that the victims of these murders have not been forgotten. Along that street, is a large and very long retaining wall that has traditionally been allocated for graffiti (a very good idea). The wall is divided into panels and so the usual practice is for people who are painting it to paint over one of the existing panels. Nothing lasts for very long there; paintings of comparative artistic merit---I remember last time I was there one particularly beautiful series of Celtic knots that some art students had painted across several panels---don't last any longer than the crudest graffiti.
But there is one panel that for 15 years has remained solid, somber black: the panel dedicated to the victims of the Gainesville murders and specifically of killer Danny Rollings. Their names are painted in white; and there is a bouquet of flowers affixed to the wall. Once in all that time someone obliterated this humble but enduring memorial, but it was speedily restored. A few years ago, the city planted palm trees along the central median of this same section of 34th Street, each dedicated to one of the murder victims.
The murders were brutal, involving the rape and torture of the victims. We didn't know that, though we heard through various sources at the time that the bodies had been horrifically mutilated. It was a sad and frightening time.
Another of his victims was a young man who was confidently believed to be the killer for what seems in retrospect to have been a considerable time. He was only 18 or 19 at the time and he was innocent. I doubt he will ever recover. There's no wall memorializing his suffering for the same reason that I'm not mentioning his name in this note, but it's certain that he did suffer.
Shortly before his execution, he confessed to a triple murder in Shreveport, Louisiana.
So now Danny Rollings is dead. A friend of mine from Gainesville, a passionate progressive who in general opposes the death penalty, phoned me up to say that she was glad he was being executed and she couldn't wait for him to be dead. In his case, though she generally opposes the death penalty, she just didn't care.
I admit that I have had to fight against feelings very much like those she expressed, but to me this is part of the damage that Rollings inflicted on the community he ravaged. His death isn't a compensation for that damage. No Christian should long for the death of another human being, however evil, and a Christian nation should be focused (even against all odds) on something other than the state-sanctioned killing of even Danny Rollings.
"It's barbaric," said my English husband. He said it gently because his objective was to help me get past my own cold indifference to this particular execution, not to judge me. And he did help me, because I see now that he is right. He was a special constable for the Metropolitan police in London for twelve years and he remains keenly interested in law enforcement and conservative by British standards, but he finds many aspects of the American criminal justice system shocking. He will not discuss his views on the death penalty; he finds the very notion barbarous and wrong. It's simply not up for discussion.
At the time of the Rollings murders I did not oppose the death penalty. I wasn't exactly in favor of it, but I didn't think it was wrong. I certainly thought---and I think now---that Rollings earned it if anyone ever did.
But a great deal of life has happened to me between now and then, and I don't think there is anything that could change my mind. If I were killed, the last thing in the world I would want would be more death as a result of it. Nor would I want my family to waste their lives waiting for vengeance. As a Christian, I prefer to leave that problem to God.
But more to the point, I wouldn't want my death, however horrific, to be inextricably linked in their minds to my killers. I wouldn't want my murderer killed in my name. The thought horrifies me.
I hope I'd feel the same if it were someone I cared for. Would I? I don't know, but I think I would. It's partly the revulsion I feel for the way murder affects the survivors of its victims: it imparts to them the desire to inflict suffering in their turn, and that desire changes them. And while I think this feeling is natural, I don't think it is one that society should foster or encourage (and we do foster and encourage it). If someone were to brutally kill Nick or my mother or one of my friends, I'd feel anger and hatred the same as anyone else, but I'd struggle to keep it separate from the love and grief I felt toward the person I'd lost.
People who lose loved ones to murder and especially to murders of great brutality such as these need society's help, but of a different kind. They shouldn't be told or permitted to believe that "closure" requires them to witness a death in their turn. To me, the practice of permitting victims' famillies to watch the execution makes them accessories to the death which, legal or not, can't be good in any way for the suffering soul of the bereaved. They need to be supported and helped to come to terms with the grim fact that there are people in this world who take pleasure in ravaging and destroying the innocent and helpless.
The task for those of us who witness it is to try to remain---as far as possible---untainted by it. The desire to inflict suffering, even if it is hardly equal in kind or intensity, is perfectly natural and for that reason ought to be resisted. It's something one can't help feeling, but it's one that needs to be controlled and redirected. I don't blame these people for their wish to see him dead, but I also don't see it as the best result for them. I'm sorry, but I don't.
To pluck out an eye is an ugly and a brutal act, and the fact that its owner did the same to you or yours doesn't change that. That's no way, I think, to honor the dead. Old Testament justice---because, after all, we have so many other options than the ancient Hebrews----for us to pay the tribute demanded by grief. Rolling's death can't undo or heal the horror he inflicted. Nor can it make us forget.
Nor should anyone forget.
I am sorry for all Rollings' victims and I am not sorry at all for Danny Rollings---this is not a case as to which there is any doubt of guilt or intent. Nevertheless, I think his execution was wrong and I think it was wrong for the state to permit the victims to be present. If we must have the death penalty, it is wrong for the state to encourage the notion that it is a matter of personal rather than public vengeance.
I hope that those of Rollings' victims who needed to see him die, and who did see him die, will be able to move on now. I hope they will be able to put out of their heads not only the imagined horrors inflicted on their children, but also the image of Rollings himself.
It's not a matter of what a killer's execution does to him; it's a matter of what it does to us.
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