Slaying hits too close to home

It’s something of a staple in journalism these days, appearing on the front pages and the 6 o’clock news each time an act of horrific violence occurs in a small community in America.

The media arrive, roam the streets with cameras and notebooks, and come away with the tragic account of the loss of a town’s innocence, of people who have been stripped of their sense of security and can never feel the same way again about the place they call home.

I’ve written a few of the stories myself over the years, from towns all over Maine.

Yet even as I’ve scribbled the quotes of nervous neighbors, who suddenly had begun locking their doors for the first time and fretting for their children, I always felt they were naive to think such terrible things could never happen in their midst.

Now, after the brutal slaying in my own Bangor neighborhood recently, in a house just a few doors up from my own, I think I understand those feelings a little better than I had before. It isn’t the first murder committed in Bangor since I settled here and almost certainly won’t be the last. But this one hit so chillingly close to home, physically and emotionally, that my old neighborhood hasn’t looked quite the same to me since.

I happened to be sitting on my porch when the victim, a man with a disability, was being beaten savagely in the apartment nearby. I was probably deep into a crossword puzzle at the time, enjoying the starry stillness of the late hour, as the poor man’s arms and legs were being bound behind him with electrical cord and plastic bags were being sealed over his head to hasten his death.

I heard nothing – no angry shouts, no cries for help – and was only mildly curious when I noticed Bangor’s massive white mobile-crime lab vehicle rolling slowly past my house. I slept well that night, mercifully unaware of the atrocities that had just snuffed out a man’s life nearby.

The next morning, one of our newspaper’s photographers stopped his car in front of my house and yelled to me, “How does it feel to have a murder right in your own neighborhood?” When I walked up the street, I saw immediately where the lumbering vehicle had been headed the night before. The familiar house now wore the hideous trappings of a crime scene – the plastic tape that cordoned it off from the public, the emergency vehicles in the yard, the police busily moving in and out.

Later, when I heard the details of the murder at work, I felt the way those people I’ve interviewed must have felt after similar acts of violence had been visited on their small towns. A murder not only steals a life, it damages an unspoken bond among the people who have put down roots in the small town or the quiet city neighborhood where it happens, decent people who have come to expect, perhaps unrealistically, that the sense of security they have treasured so long would be with them always.

To lose that to violence is to have a trust betrayed.

My two grown children visited recently, but we didn’t talk about the murder. If they had heard the news, they didn’t say, and I didn’t bother to bring it up. This street, after all, is where they were raised, where they roamed happily as kids, where they learned to roller-skate and ride their bikes. It’s the street they know better than any other in the world, and I would rather not degrade their memories of the pleasant neighborhood where they grew up.

In that regard, I suppose I’m as naive as the next guy.