Cat Fight!

Kalamazoo has a conundrum: As our little county struggles to right its listing ship, one of our Commissioners has turned on the other. They're both Democrats, mind you, opposite poles of the same planet. This has to do with the recent firing of Corporation Counsel Elizabeth White - or, "Beth", as Commissioner Tracy Hall calls her in an op-ed hit piece published in the local cloud.

For you regulars, yes, this is the same Commissioner Hall with whom I corresponded about poor Charlie's case, and was told that we just needed to let the lawyers handle it. (That was in January 2017.) In her email to me then, Hall wrote:

"I read parts of your blog. I was reminded of my own uncle and the deep love we had for each other."

Whatever. When my sister later asked her for any kind of an update on our demand to correct the erroneous Cause of Death on her son's Death Certificate, a gatekeeper stepped in between them... The Corporation Counsel again, only this time, one named Amber BB.

BB emailed my sister a horrifying cluster of words that intentionally shreds the very parchment upon which is written the social contract of all free people. The county's Corporation Counsel - they're taking applications again, by the way - deliberately contravened the citizen's absolute right to representative government, saying the Commissioner was not at liberty to answer her, uh, constituent.

(And we wonder why three out of the last nine presidents have been impeached... 10 if you count Gerald Ford.)

Anyway, BB got fired. Why is anybody's guess. Her replacement, with whom I had some interesting interactions, also got fired, and that's what prompted Hall's sudden plunge into the icy waters of public discourse. In her op/ed piece ratting out her fellow Commissioner, Julie Rogers (ostensibly for leaving a voice mail having to do with Beth's firing), she at first pats herself on the back amply:

"As an elected official, I listen to people every day sharing their hopes and dreams for the future, but more recently, sharing their fears about our government and the moral clarity of our elected officials."

Don't worry, I'm not going to do this all day. Suffice it to say that Hall gave our grieving family nothing but lip service at first, and then nothing at all. She did nothing to further our hope that Charlie's name not be smeared with the false allegation of Suicide, or to our dream that the Michigan Supreme Court will someday divest this little county of its notions of Total Supremacy.

In her published broadside, she took another deep step into the cranberries, cribbing:

"According to the Pew Research Center’s Public Trust in Government poll, the percent of Americans claiming to trust government to do the right thing always or most of the time has fallen steadily from 73% in 1958 (the first year Pew ran the poll) to 17% in 2019."

YEAH. BECAUSE OF PEOPLE LIKE YOU. People who sit by and do nothing while Kalamazoo County doesn't do the right thing.

In my opinion, Tracy's just smearing her fellow Democrat because, golly, they both have ambitions for a State House of Representatives run. They want to get the f*ck out of Kalamazoo and head on out to Lansing, so as to serve under Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Michigan Legislature (a.k.a. Snow White and the 148 Dwarfs). It's understandable.

And let's face it. Out of those two, Julie Rogers is the more attractive candidate, enough said about that. It is Commissioner Rogers who is blamed by the disgruntled ex-employee White in her attempt to deprive the taxpayers of money in an enrichment-seeking lawsuit. Beth is sort of alleging that Mrs. Rogers lorded it over her, and I emailed the Commissioner about that, to thank her if that was indeed the case.

Democrats, in Kalamazoo County and elsewhere, face a steep enough hill as they get ready for the Trump Re-Election Juggernaut next year. Infighting, for whatever opaque motives Tracy Hall may have, is not part of the solution... Especially when ya don't mean it.

pH 12.21.19

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Living in the Past

Below is a comment my Mom left in April, 2017. Every word of it remains relevant today. It's a shame that she did not live to see justice for Charlie. Rita Heller passed away on November 13, 2019. We wish it were not so.

Take it away, Mum.

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As Charlie's grandmother I am still very concerned and dismayed at the finding of Charlie's death as SUICIDE. The reasons given were threefold:

Suicide Circumstances
Recent suicide of friend/family
Crisis in past 1 weeks
Other relationship problem

These three things are simply figments of someone’s imagination and are most certainly not true.

Recent suicide of friend/family - there has been no suicide of any family member, no suicide of any known friend or acquaintance of either Charlie or anyone else that we know. This is simply not true.

Crisis in the past 1 weeks – there was no crisis in Charlie’s life, no crisis in either Charlie’s maternal or paternal family, or for any of his friends or acquaintances. This is simply not true.

Other relationship problem – what on earth does this statement even mean? If there was any relationship problem in this 12 year old's life he most certainly would have shared that with his mother, father, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends or grandparents. This is simply not true.


http://legalbeagle.com/8787355-mean-cause-death-undetermined.html

Problems in Possible Suicide Cases

In the same article, Dr. Panella also explains that for a ruling of suicide, the medical examiner must conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the person intentionally meant to kill himself. This can prove tricky for a medical examiner, because once again he does not know the intent if there are not other reports available to help him make that determination. If a person dies after drinking a large amount of alcohol and ingesting a large amount of sleeping pills, it might appear as suicide, but there is reasonable doubt. The person might not have realized how many pills he was taking or meant to take something else, not sleeping pills. According to Dr. M.J. Breiding of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many suicides end up as undetermined classification due to the lack of knowledge surrounding intent.

Meaning of Undetermined

Most states recognize five causes of death: undetermined, natural, homicide, suicide and accidental. The main problem for medical examiners in classifying death is that homicide, suicide and accidental all involve intent. A medical examiner may classify the cause of death as undetermined if the intent is not understood at the conclusion of an autopsy, due to legal consequences attached to such cases. For legal purposes an undetermined cause of death simply means the medical examiner cannot say for sure what caused the death of the person. For example, if a person with severe heart problems dies of a heart attack and is found to have a large dose of cocaine in his system during autopsy, it may not be clear if the heart attack was natural or cocaine caused it. If the medical examiner cannot conclude, he might list the death as undetermined.

Our family wants the Death Certificate changed to Accidental - not UNDETERMINED as that means they don't know how it happened (ligature marks and witness statements say that he was found hanging so that ought to be obvious) and of course not say SUICIDE because there was no indication of intent whatsoever either by word or written.

Our family would like to be able to grieve Charlie and not constantly have to struggle with this death certificate finding - it is almost two years now and we pray daily that the coroner will change the finding as was offered in a recent letter from Thom Canny.

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RVH 12.o5.19