Child Murder in Seattle and Elsewhere

Michelle Malkin posts the horrifying story of an evil blot in Seattle who murdered his two daughters, and his relatives who wrote him a nice sweet obituary (I’m not being sarcastic — they really did) containing a photo of the victims playing with their killer.

I won’t try to recap what Michelle wrote, please see it for yourself. It is a really harsh post but it should be.

After you read Michelle, check out this job ad: “If you are interested in joining a dynamic team of highly capable professionals in the fields of energy analysis and software development, please send us your resume. We are a small company, with a great group of individuals, working and living in the exciting Seattle metropolitan area.” It apparently was posted by the guy Michelle writes about, Stephen Byrne, the one who killed his two young daughters, Kelsey (11) and Hayley (9).

Evil hid behind the banal.

Treating child-killers with respect sickens me. I posted about a similar story in July 2003. It was a case of an anti-Bush “poet” (I use the term loosely, any comparison to someone whose work even a Bush-hater would like to read is purely coincidental) who on July 16, 2003 murdered her two-year-old son, Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa, reportedly in part because no one appreciated her drivel and in part because her relationship with the guy she had been sleeping with (the dead boy’s out-of-state father) wasn’t working out. The Washington Post’s coverage of the murder included such vomit as a quote from Jim Grimsley of Emory University saying of the toddler-killer: “This is a terrible loss for all of us at Emory, as well as the world of poetry” and a friend of the murderer, Denise King-Miller, saying the toddler-killer “was such a beautiful spirit. It’s just a loss to the world.” (It is tragic that particular loss didn’t occur as a solitary event.)

There is only one way to deal with the memory of people who kill their children, and that is with as much derision, spite and vitriol as one can manage to produce. Maybe then at least one person who is thinking about aping one of these zeros will be deterred out of their own sheer selfish desire not to have their memory mocked.

(Please don’t send me any e-mails defending any of these people who kill their children. That happened after I posted Did He Have a Dimple When He Smiled? last year about the Washington Post’s coverage of the death of little Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa. [Yes, really, I got e-mail complaining that I was too harsh on the killer.] The Post, by the way, redeemed itself somewhat. I had complained that the Post’s initial story about the murder-suicide told us all about the killer mother, but nothing about the little boy. A later piece in the Post by Paula Span painted a much fuller picture of little Jehan, a little boy who loved music and apparently was quite wonderful.)

Little Jehan would have been four this month.



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