It's Just Not Supposed To Be This Way, Part 2

As the people in Louisville were reading online or watching the news this morning about the funeral of one the five Amish girls executed earlier this week, little did they know that our own city would be facing something just as tragic as that massacre.  During lunchtime today, the news channels were giving us breaking news about a father killing his four children and seriously wounding his wife.  The family were refugees from Somalia, who came here to escape the torture and poverty in their civil war-torn country of Bantu.  The father and the mother had an argument over their four children, and this morning the man just snapped and killed his four kids and attempted to kill his wife.  He went downtown to the main police station this morning and turned himself in, telling the police that he had killed his four children, and gave them the address where to find them.  A father killing his children is one more thing that is just not supposed to happen.

The family lived in one of the south end housing projects; the same housing project that my great aunt Laura lived in for about twenty years.  In fact, Aunt Laura's building was right next to the building where the children were found killed. This afternoon, I thought a lot about those projects - all of the times I went along with my family to visit Aunt Laura.  I was too little to be aware of all of the jokes or derogatory comments that people made about the projects; all I knew was that Aunt Laura lived in this apartment building that was surrounded by dozens of identical apartment buildings.  I played out in the yard and even out in the streets with the kids that lived there; we all paid no attention to the color of our skins or to how much money our parents had or didn't have - all we did was play together. 

We talked about this today at work.  The most common comment was what would cause a person to kill their children.  My answer was that something just snapped inside the person - that's just about the only thing I could come up with. We can't imagine what those four little children experienced during their short lives, especially during their last moments, but they are finally in a peace-filled place now.