THE HERALD ANGELS
It is that time of year when there is always much talk of angels. Christmas songs, church services and snowflakes gently riding a winter breeze all remind us of the angels among us. It is not a time of year that we associate with the making of angels however, and in two places last week, angels were made.
In Covina, California, a beautiful little town about 20 miles east of Los Angeles, where I have friends, by the way, a Christmas Eve party turned to horror under the attack of an ex-husband. Bruce Jeffrey Pardo who was just divorced from his wife Sylvia in January, drove to the party at his ex-in-laws house and, apparently, opened fire and then torched the house. With a homemade device he sprayed racing fuel around the house before torching it. At the time of this writing it was still unclear whether the nine victims died from gunshots or from burning to death. Pardo was dressed in a Santa Claus suit during the rampage and it caught fire. He drove 40 miles to his brother's house after the massacre with third degree burns and the suit melted to his skin. It reminds me of the scene in Cape Fear when Robert Deniro's character is sprayed with lighter fluid, his flesh dripping from his bones, as he continues his violent assault, undaunted.
Of course, Cape Fear was a movie. The incident in Covina is real.
Around the corner, in Phoenix, Arizona, two young boys, cousins, ages 10 and 7, were followed to a park by an adult neighbor and beaten to death with a baseball bat. Joe Gallegos, 36, was charged with their murders. At the time of this writing, there were no further details as to motive. After the beating, it is said that Gallegos simply walked home.
It is stunning, the atrocity of these crimes. The extremity of it, not just the acts themselves, but the violence. In one case, the perpetrator walks calmly home after just hammering two young boys to death on a playground. In the other, the shooter/arsonist drives for about an hour with third degree burns and a Santa suit melted to his flesh. His ambivalence to the physical pain a sad clue as to how he weathered the psychological ramifications of having just murdered nine people who were previously "family".
Many times I have written here about the violence sweeping our country. I feel as helpless as you do and just as lost for ideas about where it comes from or how we stem it. Desperately sad is the fact...yes, the fact, that we have become used to it. School shootings, mall shootings, domestic-disturbance shootings, pleasure-shootings, sport-shootings...it's all falling under one big tent. This story will raise our eyebrows for a day, and then go away. It will be replaced promptly by the next one, a "fresh" story. The events themselves will leave lives of survivors ruined, families destroyed. It will burden the legal system with trials and lawsuits. It will scar our culture.
If ever there were a way to identify these people before they implode, I would gladly sign on as a soldier of fortune in that cause. If only it were that easy. That will never happen though, because we relish our freedom to the point that even multi-convicted violent criminals are released and re-released back into society. If we can't pull it together to keep the known dangers isolated from the rest of us, there is certainly no hope of any preventive-maintenance. It is up to the rest of us, I suppose, to somehow know in advance that a neighbor or ex-brother-in-law is about to turn deadly.
Good luck with that.
Karl From New Hampshire