Friday, August 01, 2008

WHY+WHY=WHY
A local 'news item' is making headlines around the world tonight...

some complete whackjob on a Greyhound Bus heading to my city suddenly stabbed the passenger next to him and then decapitated him.

HERE is the horrifying story.

Since 911, travelling by Bus is prolly the only method of transportation that hasn't enforced some measure of security. That ended today.


I used to take the bus on this very same route back in the early 80s when I lived in Brandon and got my first job out of College as a TV commercial writer/producer. Every once and a while I got tired of driving my Truck to Whateverpeg and just hopped on the bus after work on a Friday. It was cheap and I could relax and sleep for 2&1/2 hours which was awesome especially in the Winter when it is dark by 5pm and driving on an ice covered Trans Canada Highway sucks.


Now we all know that this demented f*cking nutjob will get off with a lesser penalty because he is obviously crazy. I resent that. In the following days the identity and background on this sonofabitch will be splattered around the world.


The Bus Lines will announce the implementation of metal detectors on passengers and we will all wonder how and why this happened...and people will continue to blame the other passengers for NOT intervening.


The victim was sleeping with his head against the window..

just like I did.


For the next several years as this case crawls through the legal system at a snail's pace, our Government will waste $80,000 a year housing, feeding and medicating the 40 year old 'suspect' while paying for psycho-analytical professionals to evaluate his chances of re-entering society.

Arbitrary random acts of mindless, savage, violence make my blood boil and my skin crawl....

WHY+WHY=WHY

33 comments:

  1. not nice

    not nice at all


    :-(

    "why" indeed. . .

    . . .I won't even hesit to offer an explanation, because there's not one adequate enough really, is there (altho there are explanations)

    am thinking of the family of the deceased

    :-( :-(

    despite this, I wish you and yours a good weekend

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  2. okay...not good. goddamit...ive been traveling on the bus for the last 20 years...and this scared the hell out of me. and yes, we dont know who actually gets on the bus, all weirdos. thats it, im driving from now on. :(

    and u do the same Donn.

    and yeh, politics...wat can we say...not mend the cause of the problem, but torment the victims. and the cause stays there forever.

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  3. Anonymous4:46 am

    Has the guy offered up any osrt of "reason"? None will suffice, but I'd sure like to know if it was premeditated or personal in any way.

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  4. Donnnn, I've been watching this on the news since it broke.... the guy must have had voices in his head telling his to do this for some reason.... he sounds way too detached from reality for any other explanation... but I agree wholeheartedly with you - the legal system sucks, it will take forever to findout anything, and the guy will (hopefully) be locked away for the rest of eternity as a total nutjob not fit to re-enter society.

    Dontcha wish we still had the death penalty for some of these cases?

    Haven't ridden the bus in years but now.... I NEVER will again!

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  5. Bollocks to rehabilitation. If you take a life and it's not in self defence you should be locked away for life. No therapy but no state murder. You can read all the books you like and eat all the porridge you can handle. If you want to kill yourself you should be given the means to.

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  6. Anonymous9:18 am

    Yah, whackjob or not... evil is evil.

    If I was the legal system, he'd be in court today and had a needle in his arm tomorrow.

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  7. Never mind metal detectors, that bus needs 'Mental detectors'!

    And only 'Second Degree Murder???'

    The world really has gone mad along with the already insane.

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  9. This is one of those 'can't-look-away' type stories and I'm thirsting for more info. Too gruesome for words.

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  10. Anonymous10:14 am

    Fuck. Ing . hell.

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  11. I just commented about this on WW's blog. The guy is clearly a nutjob, but the whole thing is still so hard to accept. As I said in WW's blog, I can't imagine how horrifying this news has been to the loved ones of the young victim. I don't see how the people who witnessed it will ever get passed the trauma.

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  12. I had nightmares because of this last night so I can't imagine how the passengers who witnessed it are feeling.

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  13. I LIKE THE VIEW
    The horror of events like this is that there is NO rhyme or reason..although once the media learns more about this psycho we will prolly be able to piece together a trail of unmistakable traits that would have predictedably tagged him as a timebomb.

    Living in a 'free' society sometimes seems to cost more than it's worth.

    GHOSTAY
    No doubt this person has suffered along the way but lacked the impulse control governor that most of us manage to wrestle away from our psyche. Decades ago the Government decided to offload mental health patients and let market forces prevail...it didn't work...that's why there are so many 'street' people in North America.

    Since there is still so much stigma attached to this issue, society is still reluctant to deal with it. Seriously, can you think of an organ that deserves more attention than our brain?

    We ARE our brain!

    CITIZEN MONDO
    Not as yet..I am watching the feed..he seems to know that he needs to play the insanity plea.
    I received another shock when I went to the Facebook memorial site for the victim R.I.P. Tim Mclean

    I found many cyberasshats making jokes and and just trying to get attention since they knew that this was a swarm site..already over 8,000 members. This will certainly not dampen my misanthropic depressing view of mankind...well some of them..little megalomaniacal bastards.

    PONYGIRL
    I read that around 70% of the general public would favour the return of Capital Punishment..not too surprising. However any concept of accountability and deterence would be completely lost on this monster...assuming he isn't 'acting'. Personally, I just don't see any reason to warehouse psychotic murderers..I would rather spend the money on education or as terrible as this sounds, improving highways.

    If we were all trapped on a desert island with this monster we would need to eliminate him in order to survive..however the Government has unlimited access to our wallets and knows what is best for us.

    GEOFF
    I wish that parole was impossible for murderers and the main reason that we don't have the death penalty is because there are too many innocent people in prison...the system does not work and nobody is satisfied with it and nobody wants to tackle changing it...the insiders have it set up to create fees.

    I wouldn't give him any books.

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  14. CATSCRATCH
    I noticed that a lot of people were very critical about the rest of the passengers not handing our some frontier justice. I know that almost everyone was half asleep and that this was a big scary guy with a knife..who knows how you'd react...but the Busline will be forced to do something..and the drivers need to put their foot down and demand better protection..who the hell is gonna feel safe now..we all know how copycats get off.

    POET LAURA-EATE
    Well it wasn't premeditated or was it? We may never know because this monster may be carzy but deceptively cunning and able to sway the people trying to establish his sense of reality.

    Who knows how many timebombs are out there..I suspect that there are far too many.

    ANDREA
    It is so macabre and sensational that it cannot be ignored. We are morbidly curious about how viscious humans can be..like machete hacking by child soldiers in Rwanda or the ethnic cleansing in Serbia there is always a new horrendous example of the depths of our inhumanity.

    What will we do when we locate these impulse control and delsuion markers on the Human Genome?

    Will we systematically eliminate the timebomb gene pools? I hope so but I doubt it.

    FATHORSE
    My thoughts exactly. A young man on the cusp of Life taken out by a complete waste of amino acids...now the enablers will come out to defend the assassin by explaining how his actions were formed by his own tortured life..and that he deserves to be treated as a victim too.

    ANNA
    Yes the survivors will feel that distasteful sensation that exists between it could have been me and thank gawd it happened to the proverbial other guy. I am fairly sure that I wouldn't get on another bus...then a gain, it is amazing what we get used to.

    MJ
    I thought about it all night too..a confined space full of strangers is going to keep getting more and more uncomfortable. At some point I can see how those futuristic models of pre-approved conforming citizens will be demanded.

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  15. The death penalty does NOT deter murder. You might notice that here in the States murder continues at a healthy clip. Vengence is worthless. It does not bring the victim back.

    But there IS a cure.

    Baring some incredible evidence that this man was possesed by the devil himself, or that he was framed right in front of all those witnesses, this is simply a case of rabid dog on the loose, and what do we do with rabid dogs?

    We put them down.

    We don't put rabid dogs down because they murdered and broke the law or because we want vengence on a sick animal.......we do it because rabid dogs are bad business, period, no futher explanation needed.

    In clear cut cases I fully support the death penalty rather than paying room and board for evil mutherf*****ers for life. Unfortunately, you guys don't have the death penalty, do you?

    Let him out on bail and give him a bus ticket to Texas. Problem solved.

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  16. THE MICHAEL
    If we could do that we would send all of our convicted felons down to Texas! The daily busload of cons would could be emptied on one of those 'closed hunting ranchs'.

    Sounds like the premise for one of those cheesy uber-violent B movies where the one innocent man is trapped in the middle of this Turkey shoot and he must triumph above the overwhelming odds to survive and clear his name...

    which of course he miraculously does, and since we demand a happy ending, our hero is all banged up and bleeding but still alive as he hugs his daughter and steadfast wife while the credits start to roll.
    *wipes tear from eye

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  17. yikes! That is so scary. What's up with people? This 14 year old paperboy got killed just down the street from where I live a while ago fĆør no reason. Completely unprovoked

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  18. Anonymous4:16 pm

    Down here, this news item topped the transfer to The Hague of Radnan Karadzic.
    Had he merely stabbed a passenger, this would have been second-column news. It's the decapitation that has headlined it.
    I fear copycats. (Hell! I hope they don't read your blog!)

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  19. a couple times a month I do a two hour bus/train trip...and don't usually scrutinize who sits next to me....just a pleasant greeting and back to whatever I am reading...

    sorrows me to think that may change.

    I saw a photo of the boy who was killed...and read a bit about him...damn...I have kids his age.

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  20. My heart and thoughts go out to the young man murdered, and his family, what on earth must they be going through too.

    It just defies believing, I've only just read this on computer news update.

    We have had an increase in violent related crime through a certain and particular drug taking increase, (I think it's ice?) In some it can cause aggression beyond normal realms, one of the city hospitals has refitted an emergency ward for this kind of drug related behaviour, basically it is a padded room.

    A beautiful young life just taken like this..it's so wrong, so upsetting.

    Pam

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  21. As I do not drive any longer, I gotta travel by bus. No other choice.

    We sure are living in insensitive times. In the recent Ahmedabad bombings, real life followed reel life. Recently a Hindi movie was made where terrorists were shown blowing up a hospital. And it happened that way in Ahmedabad. 16 bombs, 50+ dead. And 25 live bombs found in Surat. It too is in Gujarat.

    You gonna love my recent post. Do check it out here.

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  22. people like them are going to make normal people psycho and paranoid every second.

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  23. OMG that is just horrible! I guess it just goes to show you that there is no such thing as safe travel anymore??

    I'll stick to the flying thank you very much.

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  24. Was on vaca so wasn't watching the news. This story is absolutely tragic.

    A 'knife registry'. Gimme a break.

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  25. Not nice. A bit like the stabbing on the London tube system by a dangerous schizophrenic released into "care in the community" was not nice (the guy's family had protested that he was dangerous and likely to harm someone).

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  26. Donn, I've been anxious to read your observations on this "story".

    I knew it would rip your heart out.
    There's nothing to say, is there...

    What I really, really despise was what I read in the Bdn Sun- our American bloggers reactions to the bus event. That Canadians are "wusses" and that if we had any balls, the bus travellers would have ganged up and defended that boy.

    Oh, and that it was clearly an attack against the "americans" since it was so close to the border and the act of decapitation was clearly al queda.

    Sometimes barying one's head in
    the sand is tempting...

    Let's all bare arms like our neighbors.... that seems to be promoting world peace and deterring violence and random acts of horrer.....

    NOT

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  27. Just an insane story. It seems like everyday, more details come out, and the story gets worse and worse. Today I heard that when the guy was arrested, the cops found body parts in his pant pockets!! WTF??!?

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  28. Even the darkest humor would show too much levity. I am at a loss for words. I don't know what the answer is. I know that disarming the general population makes the maniacs fearless, but an armed populace is likely to be even more violent. We have seen whole busses exploded, mass murder in the subways, trains tampered with, planes hijacked and crashed, but these are statistical anomalies, and life goes on. I think the only place on the planet where I would hesitate to step on a bus is Jeruselem, but shit happens everywhere that a shithead might be.

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  29. Just read this on the news...shoulda come here first.

    There were 37 people that could have helped and none of them did. That's almost as scary as the actual murder.

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  30. And no, I don't think Americans would have been any braver. We have a long history of standing idly by and/or getting embroiled in the wrong fights...

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  31. Joyce,
    as an American blogger like some of the others commenting, I want to assure you that what you read is not the norm. I have not read that at all and from my conversations with folks, I had not heard it either. To tie this to Al Qaeda is the stretchiest stretch I can think of.

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  32. The only positive thing I can think to say is that we all seem to be shocked and horrified which, when you consider all the terrible crap that goes on in the world, is a good sign.

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  33. i read about this on another blog as well. its very sad and almost unbelievable!

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