Author: cdwan

I took the tickets from my aborted attempt to go visit my brother on Thursday (all praise Southwest air) and flew down for Aaron’s funeral yesterday. My parents drove up from central VA. It was a long and brutal day, but cathartic. I’m going to write all about it here and then move on.

Media

This thing has been at the front of the Metro section for the past week. The coverage has sort of converged and seems to be looking for somewhere to go:

March 4: The driver talks to the press
March 4: A retrospective article
March 5: Article about Aaron’s funeral

my long version of the day

The Post has weighed in with this editorial which sums up pretty nicely the facts and opinions presented so far. This guy has an opinion that meshes well with mine … though he’s a bit more direct in his choice of words.

I’m fixated on this. I know I shouldn’t be, that I should worry about other things, concentrate on work, or something … but my mind is captured, captivated, unable to look away from the horrible meaninglessness of the whole situation.

The fact is, it’s so close to home. I’m okay living day to day in a country that is killing off 5 to 10 of it’s young men and women every day in service to our low oil prices … where dozens per day die in the inner cities for even less reason than Aaron. I can wake up, go about my business, and not be bothered except in short doses of irritation, polemic, or rage. Those deaths are distant from me. Somehow, this one death is opening up quite a bit of suppressed rage and disappointment … and I’m left looking for something to do with the energy. But for a few trivial details, my brother would have been in that car … though his presence would have deflected the situation just enough to change the entire dynamic. But for a few years of distance, I might have been in that back seat myself.

The appropriate question is “what could we change to prevent this happening again?” The answer, sadly, is not much. It seems that laws are already in place to try to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. Hopefully the police department will do the right thing and dismiss this officer, who through his own choices endangered himself and wound up killing the wrong person. Hopefully people will wake up just a bit to the disturbingly high level of violence in our day to day life. However, I think that at root the answer remains that this is part of the cost of having armed men protect us from each other, that they sometimes kill the wrong person.

Hopefully after the funeral, after the coverage dies down, after my family returns to its usual patterns, my mind will settle back to its normal placid state of happiness. For now, I’m off to the gym to try to tire myself out a bit.

What’s new with your brother’s friend, shot in the head, you may ask?

The coverage in the Post continues, one article per day:

Feb 28: There’s a policy debate
Mar 1: People who were there dispute the officer’s account
Mar 2: The cop who shot my brother’s friend has a lawyer.

Even the DC chief of police has weighed in: “We put the emphasis on better training. Striking at a moving vehicle doesn’t do you any good. If you think you had a problem before, try adding a corpse behind the wheel,” D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said last night. “We feel better tactics, better approaches . . . is the way to go.”

The funeral is on Saturday. There’s not going to be a dry eye in the house. My brother has been asked to perform a guitar piece at the funeral, to sing in the mens chorale at the memorial service (they’re doing the Biebel Ave Maria), and the three surviving members of the band that Aaron played in will try to put together a song or two without him. It’s going to be one hella’ rough Saturday. He’s also been contacted by the Post reporter who is apparently doing a piece on Aaron’s life.

What else to say? I tried to get down to Baltimore to see him today, but failed due to the unexpected blizzard. More whining on that later, most likely.