Murderer in the Family
My nephew has become a statistic, but this may not be the last statistic he becomes. His name is Michael. He has been arrested for murder and will most likely wind up in prison. I am pretty confident that is where he will die—either by his own hand, at the hand of a fellow inmate, or at the hands of the state. It will be the culmination of a long history of sad events, with plenty of blame to go around.
Everybody in the family has basically known for decades that this would happen. For most of Michael’s adult life, it seems that he has had a violent temper. None of us are surprised that he wound up killing one man and almost killing another. So, why should this turn of events cause me to lose sleep? I have not seen Michael since February of 2006, when my mother died. I was still living in Germany at the time but had flown home to attend her funeral. Michael and I were at her apartment, helping to clear out her things. When he attempted to make a joke about how I kept dropping things, I took it the wrong way, spouted off and him and he responded in kind. If my sisters had not been there to break up the argument, either he or I could have wound up becoming a murderer or murder victim that very day. It was then that I vowed never to have anything to do with him again.
Michael is 49 years old and only 3 years younger than me. His mother, my sister, became pregnant with Michael, her first of three children, long before she was ready, and many people in the family might be tempted to argue she should never have had kids. At an early age, Michael developed hearing loss. The suspicion among my family has always been that it was from physical abuse he suffered from her. I honestly do not recall the two of them having a loving relationship even though they lived in the same household I grew up in. Michael and I got along as children, considering how close we were in age. I never thought of myself as an “uncle” to him.
As he got older, he seemed to get pushed around between family members because no one knew how to help a child with a hearing impairment. He lived with my mother for a while. My mom and dad had gotten a divorced before I entered kindergarten, but my father still lived in the neighborhood, so when I became a teenager, I moved in with my dad and step-mom, Martha, because they had asked me to. Not long after that, Michael also moved in because they also wanted to do what they could to help him. I remember a sign language manual lying around the house. Their efforts lasted for a few years, mostly because Daddy and Martha had troubles of their own to deal with. I eventually wound up moving back in with my mom. So did Michael. He was in and out of her house and the small apartment she later rented several times over the years. I have no idea why she felt the need to take him in every time. When she passed away, the medical examiner found evidence that she had had cracked ribs at some point. Some in my family may guess that she had fallen while in her apartment. Others suspect Michael had gotten angry at her for some reason and was probably the cause.
I lost track of Michael when I joined the Army. In letters from my mom and during my occasional visits home, I would receive updates. Michael would usually be working some low-wage job because he had no direction in life. Somehow, he stumbled upon the idea of going to culinary school to become a chef. From what I remember, he struggled in school mainly because the education system did not accommodate his need for a sign language interpreter. Though he used hearing aids, Michael’s hearing impairment essentially amounted to complete deafness. He could read lips pretty well, had learned some sign language, but his speech was difficult for outsiders to understand. Since he began losing his hearing at a young age, he never learned to form words properly. When he talked, it sounded as muffled as the person on the other end of a tin can telephone. Because of his handicap, he felt the world owed him something. When things didn’t work out to his liking, it was always somebody else’s fault, or society in general was to blame.
His Achilles’ heel always proved to be his deafness and how other people around him acted because of it or because of they were not aware of it. One incident related to me involved him working at a supermarket as a grocery bagger. The customer being checked out apparently wanted something from him, but Michael was not facing her. She kept trying to get his attention by saying, “Young man! Young man!” She grew impatient and eventually had to tap him on the shoulder. When he turned around, she angrily asked him, “Are you deaf?” In theory, he could have responded with something like “Yes, I am. Don’t you see the hearing aids? Are you blind?” Instead, he quit his job over the matter. While I was visiting my mom prior to her death, he showed up. The conversation remained friendly until he didn’t acoustically understand something I said and automatically assumed I had said something to insult him. He became verbally belligerent.
We had something of a friendly reunion in 1995, when I was home on vacation. I had taken up karate, and he had joined a kempo school. I was able to show him some of my skills and he showed me his. I even gave him my address in Germany so we could correspond. We managed get in a written argument over the meaning of which martial art was better at a distance of 5,300 miles.
As far as I know, Michael’s life never amounted to much of anything. The sister of mine who called me to tell me the news of his arrest seems to think he had completed his culinary training. I have no idea if he was working in the restaurant industry or working at all. Either way, he was obviously not earning enough money to have his own apartment. The news story telling of his arrest claims he and another person he shared a house with were in a dispute over noise. How do deaf people get into a noise battle? Shouldn’t that have caused a disturbance throughout the entire neighborhood? I would expect somebody next door to them to have called the police long before things escalated to shooting.
How did Michael get his hands on gun anyway? He may not have had a criminal background, but if anybody had asked anyone in my family whether he ought to own a gun, we would not have hesitated to say “no,” most likely with a few emphatic expletives mixed in. That brings us to the perennial debate over gun rights. I can say from personal experience now that not every Tom, Dick, Jane, or Harry should be allowed to have a firearm. Why did he feel the need to get a gun in the first place? Could it be that he went around causing so many fights that he knew he might run into someone bigger and stronger than him someday? It didn't help that he also burned down every bridge to his family.
No matter how little I acknowledge my kinship with him, I do have to admit what a shame it is that Michael’s life took this turn. Till my dying day, I will wonder what society might have been able to do better to help him become a productive member instead of the destructive force that exploded within him, taking three lives in the process: that of his victim, his victim’s brother, and his own.
Comments
Post a Comment