the candid files

Rain is a healing kind of weather.   The very fact of rain makes the warm dry places much more dry and warm.  Take my living room in the evening for example.  The trees around the house are tossing and moving, the rain is coming down, and the streetlights reveal a shiny, sparkling, busy world.  Rain at night is like – company, like a friend who is around, the kind of friend who needs nothing from you at this particular moment but you both just enjoy coexisting.  I have decided that I would like to live in a rainy part of the world.

This week has been such an emotional, surreal kind of a week.  I still have trouble closing my eyes without running through Facts.  Evidence.  Statements.  Mistakes.  Lies.  Hurting. Motherless, Daughterless, Lifeless.

I didn’t let any of the trial get to me for six weeks.  Six weeks of descriptions, pictures, investigations, taped telephone calls.  What is science? I learned the theory behind fingerprint examination and DNA analysis, I learned how to load the magazine of a .38 caliber Bersa handgun.  I learned the names of children and I heard peace ja love…a baptism, a new life…

I never let anything hit me anywhere deeper than the place where one stores and analyzes facts.  But on Monday I had to start using those facts to come to a decision.  Did he cause the death?  Did he cause the death unlawfully?  Did he have the state of mind required for murder? Was this murder planned and deliberate?

I don’t think words can really describe the way it feels to be required to answer those questions.  You can come to your own conclusions but you don’t understand, trust me, you don’t understand.

I only know that at last – after hours of deliberation, after an unrestful night at the Ramada Inn, after realizing a decision had been made – when my name was called, when it was time for me to stand up and give my verdict, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my strength that kept my knees under me for the brief second it took to look towards the defendant and say   guilty  but I did it.  And I didn’t cry, not until I was home, alone.

Life is a long time – it will be a long time for this man.  It wasn’t a long time for one young woman.  Twenty-three years is not long enough to be on earth – six years is not long enough to be a mother – half a day is not enough time to celebrate a new life.

She never got to live that new life.  Don’t forget what you have.

this post is dedicated to N.G.