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Highly disturbing story from my hometown, Kansas City. A beheaded three year old girl found dumped at an intersection there four years ago has now been identified as Erica Michelle Marie Green, known as "Precious Doe" by the authorities searching for her identity and killer, now identified as her stepfather. This is not the Kansas City I know, but it is one that my father is not unfamiliar with. He is a doctor at a hospital that was in the thick of the crack epidemic, drug and gang wars, urban decay. We lived in the suburbs only a ten minute drive away where these problems were as remote as if they were occuring in another country. He is conservative, one whose worldview is most shaped by the conviction that individuals need to take responsibility for themselves, a view hardwired into him from childhood by his own parents who had come of age in the Depression. So many times he has come home from the hospital thin lipped and pale and disgusted at someone shot in a drug dispute, someone dying from a disease exacerbated by their habits, at people who have let themselves become so obese that they don't fit in the machines to diagnose their ills. Sometimes I wondered to myself how someone with so much compassion could end up so alienated from the people he had committed to save. He so clearly perceived their maladies as not the outgrowth of poverty or race, but of refusing to take responsibility for oneself, refusing to take control of one's own life, or victims of living in neighborhoods that had become overtaken by such senseless crimes. It seemed obvious to me that certainly in the suburban world we lived in were a million examples of people as soft on themselves, but who were protected from a worse fate by cushions of family money, good schools, suburban safety, healthy environments, health insurance and just so much more opportunity and fall back options. Circumstances derived often not from their own hard work, but simply of birth. Why couldn't he see that, I wondered. Reading this story now from Washington DC about a horrible crime committed against a little girl in Kansas City at the hands of her own parents, a girl whose short life traversed the same path between Oklahoma and Kansas City as my father's, it's impossible not to share in a sense of horror and extreme alienation at parents who did not have the barest sense of responsibility to protect their own child, even from themselves.
Sunday Update: Hundreds pay their respects to Precious Doe at a church memorial service.