I left him at the kitchen table reading the nightly paper while my Mother lay on the couch watching the Celtic's playoffs. A while after I left, a stranger knocked on the front door. My father got up to answer. Two shotgun blasts were fired through the screen, lifting him up and hurling him backwards, the shrapnel tearing the life out of him before my mother's eyes. Those who love me and love my six brothers and sisters say that from the moment that shotgun blast turned my father's chest into hamburger, my laugh and our laughs have never been the same.
Murder is awful.
I can't tell you how painful it is to have someone you love murdered. I can't tell you about the emptiness, about the hurt. I can't begin to tell you how others treat you. When the murder is done, in a moment there is a whole series of revictimizations that begin. It is the death notification and the autopsy and the casket and the makeup and the burial and the investigation and the indictment and the trial and the hearing and the appeal.