You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The Accidental Shooting.
The call goes out as an 11-year-old shot at a bus stop.
That’s a scanner call that paralyzes the soul.
It’s a tray of China crashing on a marble floor. It’s a Tornado siren sounding at the farmer’s market.
It is a piercing shrill of information that spells panic in a newsroom and has crews dropping their number 2 pencils and flying out the door.
A child shot call has similar effects on emergency personnel. Ambulances blow out of fire halls. And Police officers activate blue lights and sirens and race to the location.
Many first responders go to the home.
When the officers arrive at the location, things are calmer than you’d expect for a school bus stop shooting.
Nobody has heard shots. Nobody sees blood. The school bus driver is at a loss to understand the line of police questioning.
“Child shot? Huh?”
It turns out the call is made from the hospital. They have an 11-year-old girl critically shot and she is being flown to Vanderbilt Medical Center’s Children’s Hospital.
Nobody realizes how serious the shooting is. That is until Vandy announces the girl died at 4:45pm.
It’s the 1st day of school. THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!
The 6th grader was coming home to share the news of her first day at school. She is a smiley faced, pre-teen, bee-bopping around the bus stop, and floating into the house full of the possibilities of a new school year.
And then…
Suddenly, she is a name on a headstone, a Headline in the paper, a breaking news live shot at 4pm.
The story is three degrees worse than sad. It is a level beyond devastating. It is a tidal surge of despondency that floods the soul and makes you ask God “Why do bad things happen to children?”
From the moment the call crackles over the scanner it doesn’t add up.
A child shot at a bus stop who then wanders into her own home to report the shooting to her daddy who then takes her by private vehicle to a hospital.
We all think the kid can’t be that badly hurt. Maybe it was a bb gun. Maybe it is a shot to the hand.
But the circumstances of life and death keep swirling around the drain and soon the facts and the realities of the crime scene are anomalous with the facts presented.
Who shot the child? Where is the blood? Are the cops looking for a killer? Detectives are telling us what they know, but they are also keeping a lot of their investigative cards close to their chest.
By the time news crews arrive at the house, officers have surrounded the home with crime tape. Crews are kept back in the street. But the home is at the bottom of a hill, and the high angle affords the telephoto lenses a great deal of latitude to peer into garages and see what investigators are doing around back.
The little white house is in the suburbs. The lawn is cut, the hedges pruned. There is obvious pride of ownership.
Police are not clear of the circumstances surrounding the child’s death, but they know that they are not looking for a killer on the loose. They tell the gathering news crews, it does not appear that the child was shot at the bus stop, and they are not looking for a gunman, but they also release little else.
Attention turns to the house.
Who was home? Where are the parents? Do they own a gun?
Tick Tock.
While the police wait on a search warrant, the crews in the field speculate on what has happened, knocking on doors, talking to bewildered neighbors.
“She was a sweet child,” a mother across the street says. “She walked her little dog, I think her name was princess. I talked to the mother, but the father,” she pauses. “The father is quiet. I see him cutting the lawn.”
Finally the search warrant arrives and cops enter the home. Once they enter the bedroom, their suspicions are realized.
It is immediately obvious to them, the girl was shot in the house, in the back bedroom, and the story floating outside the crime tape is a sham.
The father is panicked. He initially claims his daughter was shot at the bus stop and rushed into the house to tell him she was hurt.
The father says he rushes his daughter to the nearby hospital in the family car. That’s where the authorities learn of the tragedy.
But now, the facts don’t add up.
Police push the father for details. Hours later, the father will tell the cops the truth. He will tell them he was asleep and his 11-year-old entered the house making noise. For whatever reason, he didn’t expect her.
Did he not have a clock? Did he not realize his baby was coming home from the 1st day of 6th grade? Why wasn’t he waiting on the front stoop for her with some big pink balloons that said I love you?
Instead he goes for a gun!
The 11-year-old was like any grade school kid. She was full of life and excitement. She was a piñata full of possibilities waiting to explode and let the rainbow colored stories about her teacher and the kids and 6th grade wash all over her loved ones.
THEN:
BLAM…
An 11-year-old is dead.
Why God?
The father will tell the cops that he was startled by his own daughter, and he grabbed a handgun under the dresser and opened fire when she screamed to surprise him in his bedroom.
The father is charged with negligent homicide and felon in possession of a handgun and tampering with evidence.
He’s in the county jail now under a million dollars bond. His daughter is in the morgue.
Why would a father grab for a gun and open fire on his own child coming home from the 1st day of school?
Why God?
It turns out the daddy may have been reacting to a life he was trying to leave.
This father has an extensive criminal history of drugs and guns and crime.
He was busted a decade ago with 100 ecstasy pills and 3 bags of crack.
5 years ago he was seated in the back seat of an SUV and he opened fire on another driver in a busy intersection. He shot that man in the shoulder. It turns out it was retaliation for that man shooting him the year before.
He has served time and he is now living in the suburbs, trying to restart a life that got off to a bad start.
I’m told that he cuts the lawn, stays to himself, and even cuts hair for a living.
The neck tattoo that circles his wind pipe with large dark gang lettering is perhaps a reminder of the life he was trying to get away from. A tattoo from a decade ago is still as vibrant on the skin, but the intention of the symbol may have long ago faded.
To those unfamiliar, the gang letters with the pistol on his throat screams shoot at me or lock me up. But perhaps when the daddy looks in the mirror, it’s a reminder to keep running, to keep cutting hair, to keep mowing the grass in the suburbs.
But then a sudden noise in the house, and a shout in his bedroom and a knee jerk reaction to grab his 9 and start blasting.
Only this time the bullet strikes his own flesh and blood, the apple of his eye, a child he loves.
Why God?
The father is now in jail. One can only imagine the torment infesting his brain like gnawing poison spiders slowly devouring any light left in his soul.
How does a daddy rationalize killing his own daughter by accident?
The child is in heaven, looking down on an Earth filled with evil and stupid and unexplained mysteries.
Maybe the child can now answer the question, Why God?
The cops don’t have that answer. The father in the dark stank of a jail cell certainly will never understand.
Life’s Crazy™