A man well known in a community if which I am a member killed his
wife after she served him with divorce papers. Then he killed himself, orphaning his three children.
This sort of selfish, entitled, behavior is nothing new. However, I
have been disgusted by the number of people demanding compassion for
the murderer, expressing regretful dismay at his death, and imploring us to consider consider his depression.
No.
From what we know, he murdered his wife because he she dared to think
she was not his object and had the right to leave the marriage if she
wanted.
Women are at very high risk of murder in the year after
they leave their husband or partner. And rarely do men go from zero
abuse to murder.
We should spend our time and worry on those
kids, on the families left behind (even his), and call attention to the
fact that women are most likely to be murdered by their partners and
that is totally unacceptable - even if he is depressed.
My mother chooses to live a life of pain. A stumbling, non-functioning alcoholic, she attempts to drink away the numerous rapes she experienced, the severe abuse by her father and step fathers, the torture each of her husband’s have inflicted on her, and the shame of abandoning each of her children.
Every day without regard for time, without holiday or respite, she drinks herself unconscious. She blurs reality by blurring her brain with a substance that eventually will kill her, a fact she has come to terms with in recent years. If I lived in my mother’s world, I might drink my way into oblivion.
My mother chooses to cohabitate with her mother’s ex-husband. When my grandmother was married to the man, Jim O’Connor, he beat my grandmother nearly to death on regular occasion. The story goes that when my grandma tried to leave Jim, he stalked my great grandmother and took pictures of her so his wife would know he could kill her at any time. The police took no action.
After years of inflicting abuse on my grandmother, my mother decided he was quality companion material. Since he has taken over boyfriend duties for my mother, she has suffered a series of “accidents” that forensics can’t explain but the police in her area seem to believe.
One of the more severe incidents occurred when four of my mother’s fingers were almost entirely severed off. (Yes, they were able to reattach.) My mother told the police that she had done it herself with a steak knife when she repeatedly stabbed a door. I sat, playing forensic investigator, doing my darndest to figure out how she could have used a steak knife to do what she said happened. I couldn’t figure it out. The police took no action.
Now Jim has turned his attention to my sister. When my sister calls to check on my mother or my mother calls my sister to check in, Jim gets on the phone and harasses my sister. He has called her on numerous occasions and told her how he is going to kill my mother. Once he even called my sister and told her my mother is already dead and recounted how she died as my sister wept. When my sister realized he was just toying with her, she called the police. The police took no action but my sister didn’t really expect that they would.
You see, my sister had experience Jim’s menace first hand. One day, my sister went to get my mother after Jim threatened to kill her. When she arrived, with two witnesses, Jim grabbed a pot of boiling hot oil and held it over my sister’s head. As the other people restrained themselves to prevent any accidental spillage, Jim and my sister stood as he thought about killing her. Eventually he decided not to kill her. The police did not act.
One day Jim called the police in Straton, CO, and told them that my sister had threatened him with a gun. Even knowing what kind of person Jim is, the police made a felony traffic stop against my sister, pulling her from the car, throwing her on the ground and handcuffing her. They did not find a gun because she did not threaten him. She couldn’t have, he had stolen the gun she had for protection against him. The police didn’t act against Jim.
The police didn’t stop at not acting; they encouraged another police department not to act. The Sheriff’s Department of Cheyenne County Colorado was contacted by the Englewood Wood Police Department. The story the Sheriff told my sister is different than the one he told the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. The story the Englewood Police told the Colorado Bureau of Investigation is different than they told me. They all differ from the story my sister heard from my mother. I am going to tell you the story as best I can figure it out.
After the murder of his friend, Jim began to threaten to kill people. Sherriff of Cheyenne County Virgil Drescher told him to leave town, even though he knew Jim was drunk. Jim then started the two hour drive from Cheyenne Wells, CO to Denver, CO. Between those two points is a city called Englewood. The Englewood Police stopped Jim for driving drunk after he brought himself to the police’s attention when he made an illegal U turn. Jim convinced the police officer that he was distraught from the death of his son, who had been murdered recently. The police officer called Sheriff Virgil Drescher who told the police officer that there in fact was a murder and he in fact sent Jim out of town. Taking compassion on Jim, the police officer did not impound his truck, did not arrest him, and wrote him a ticket for not having insurance. He then drove the Jim to a friend’s house.
The Sheriff, Virgil Drescher, was not only unable to make an arrest, he prevented a legitimate one from being made. This isn’t the first time the police have let us down. A number of years ago I called the Yuma County Sheriff, whose name I can no longer remember, because Jim had a warrant out for his arrest in his county. I was told, “He is too expensive to house. We can’t afford the eye surgery he needs.” Jim did not need eye surgery, he needed to be arrested. We called the Wisconsin State Police to come and pick him up on a warrant they have for his arrest there. They told me they don’t extradite over misdemeanors. What is the rumor about what passes for a misdemeanor in Wisconsin? Jim held people hostage in a trailer. Even if regular old trailer trash doesn’t warrant a felony, doesn’t a police officer? One day Jim held a gun to a police officer in Straton. Eventually the felony menacing charges were dropped.
I only have one true family member, my sister. We have been abandoned by every person who was supposed to care for us but we have always had each other. I would do anything in the world to protect her, anything.
Jim has started another cycle of terror against my sister. We have begged the police to act. We begged the Mayor of Cheyenne Wells to act. We asked the City Employees to act. We asked the County Council. We have begged legislators to make them act. We have begged the governor to act. In Colorado the police aren’t even responsible to enforce restraining orders. It is every woman for herself in Colorado. No one will act. Reasonable efforts have been made and now decent people like me are left with nowhere to turn and only indecent options left.
There must be something that genocides done in the name of religion and non-religious genocides have in common. If you can stir the same level of violence without religion, I think that means we have to be more critical when we examine religious events and violence by its people. We should be careful not to commit the same causal/correlation errors theists are guilty of committing on a regular basis.
Besides the critical insight, it is an outstanding film. My review and trailer below.
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"Beyond the Gates" also called Shooting Dogs, is the story refugees in the Ecole Techniques Officielle (ETO), a secondary Catholic School, in Kigali, Rwanda during the mass genocide of the Tutsi in of 1994. Told through the eyes of those people trapped behind the school gates, "Beyond the Gates" made me cry, tremble with fear and helped me see what our role was, as members of the U.N., passively standing by as hundreds of thousands of people died.
On April 6, 1994 the Rwandan Military shot down their president's plane and started a coup that eventually led the to the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans. During the first days of the genocide, thousands of Tutsi flocked to the the Ecole Techniques Officielle (ETO) a large catholic school where the U.N. Peace Observers were stationed. The priest stationed to the ETO, Father Christopher, brilliantly portrayed by John Hurt, walks a thin line between hope and hopelessness. He forces the UN to open the gate after the killings begin and their fortifications are set. Eventually, at his insistence, thousands of people find their way into the safe haven in his school. Young school teacher Joe Connor, masterfully played by Hugh Dancy, is forced to face his innocence and leave it on a Kigali dirt road.
The U.N. is the only thing between the Hutu and the Tusi, keeping a parameter at the edge of the school. The U.N. refuses to enforce the peace, and take active steps against the Hutu to stop the slaughter because their mandate was only to observe the peace. As more people shove onto the school grounds, the U.N. support becomes less sure.
David Wolstencroft, Richard Alwyn and David Belton wrote each of the characters with care, all with surprising strength and weaknesses. Even the characters in the film for a brief moment have emotional complexities. Every character surprised and touched me. It is also very rare that a film would have characters that are representative of a larger group of people, or message and still give them an individual humanity relatable to by any person with a heart.
"Beyond the Gates" is filmed on location in Kigali, Rwanda. Director Michael Caton-Jones believed that by filming there gave more credence to the story because it was just above the surface there. Many of the cast and crew were either at ETO, such as one woman who was raped and transacted HIV, or were affected by the genocide in Rwanda but outside the ETO. Many of the people on the cast and crew lost their whole family. Having so many people affected by the events portrayed gave the film a sincerity that made me angry, dejected and engrossed in the story.
[I feel the need to put a small disclaimer in here. I have to be vague about a lot of the character traits because if I say too much, I will have spoiled the ending of the film for you. I am understating the quality of each of the performances because I can't fully develop their qualities with out giving away the ending. So, for that reason, I'm tying my own hands and under valuing the performances in my review.]
John Hurt's character, Father Christopher, tries to give hope to the people in his school but can feel his hope fading away. The transformation from carefree to emotionally spent weighs heavy on the audience. It's as if the writers pulled the plug in his emotional bath tub.
Use Christopher's conversations with the Counsel to tell you what is going on in the story. You have to read between the lines, but what they are actually saying is obvious. It is the best dialogue in the movie. Their smiling conversations are an exercise in diplomatic brinkmanship.
Joe Conner, Hugh Dancy's character, shows the truth about courage. As he is trying to hold on to his courage, Dancy gives Joe Conner a wealth of insecurities in which I was able to relate. Seeing Conner stripped of his child like impressions of the world and himself was heartbreaking.
Capitaine Charles Delon of the Belgium Army dispatched to be a U.N. peacekeeper is one of the most dimensional characters in the story. As a person wants nothing more than to act on the violence outside the gate but as a solider feels honor and duty bound to follow orders. Delon's, played by Dominique Horwitz, conscience suffers from the events in his past and he struggles with making it suffer in the future. He spends a lot of the movie trying to answer the question: Am I soldier or a person first?
Marie is the symbol of hope in the film. Her unwavering faith is inspiring and sometimes feels a little naïve. Claire-Hope Ashitey gives Marie a light way about here, even when the days are dark. Her part is small, but important to the movement of the story.
Rachael, a BBC reporter, speaks for the western world. Her brutal honesty about a situation and the way she feels is a highlight of the film. Rachael (Nicola Walker) says what so many people were thinking and no one would say.
There are a few film problems. There are a few scenes that are over processed and a few out of focus. These small problems didn't take too much from the film; they last only a few minutes but were enough for me to notice.
Why didn't I know about these things before the trend of movies on the subject of late? Why does it take over ten years for stories like this to touch us? Are we so ethnocentric that we can't see these people as people, relate to their strife or have active compassion for their situation? It makes me angry that we don't reach out to people like this when they need us, not ten years later.
See this movie. The acting is amazing, the writing is exceptional, the direction is flawless and the story left me shaking with fear, searching for a tissue, and most importantly, interested in Rwanda.
