Before I get rolling with this one, I want to again express my gratitude to the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety officers who rushed to our house on July 26th, 2015 with every intention of saving my young nephew's life. They know who they are.
And I know they meant to do it because I was able to ride virtual shotgun with every one of them, having watched all of their police car DVD's (which we acquired long before the Medical Examiner's Office did in their own leisurely way). I consumed hours and hours and hours of video and audio so that I wouldn't have to guess what had happened.
Or have to listen to anybody else try to misrepresent it.
One employee of the police department who was not at the scene that night was, ah, Shannon Bagley. He seemed to be more along the lines of a captain or something, not a guy in body armor, but like an office guy.
When we began our inquiry as to why the MEO - through its contractor WMed - would fraudulently, maliciously and arbitrarily rule little Charlie's death a Suicide, Bagley ended up being one of the interference runners for the City as they and the County played Monkey in the Middle with us.
One of our complaints was, and is, that it took the detectives over two hours to arrive that night. Bagley presented himself as a person who would look at this with a fresh set of eyes... Inspiring rhetoric. Almost like a politician.
But he didn't do what he said he would.
Instead, he husked up and started defending his Department, insisting that the detectives had shown up in a timely manner. When I saw the effect that this official gaslighting had on my already-destroyed sister, I opted to interject.
I emailed Bagley and explained that cop car video actually shows that the blond detective Sheila Goodell did not come flouncing onscreen until well after 10pm - over two hours after the original 911 call, more than an hour and a half after they stopped doing chest compressions on Charlie, who was still laying on the ground while we all waited in the darkness.
I asked him to define, then, what he understood to be a timely manner. I explained that, in the computer age, timely means something less than what it may have used to. I asked him to respond to my email in a timely manner, and he did not.
So, about an hour later, I posted on YouTube the dash cam footage showing the time of night, with the audio clearly capturing the grim exasperation of those exhausted officers as they literally asked each other where the hell the detectives were. I sent the video link to Bagley and asked him if he still thought the detectives' arrival was timely.
Instead of replying to me like a decent public servant, Bagley sent an email to my sister's attorney, griping that I had contacted him, mistakenly referring to me as Charlie's father (meaning he did not even read the entirety of what was sent to him).
I then took the video down, because I felt I had made my point, and I had also discovered that Shannon Bagley was not someone I could trust. Or anything even close to it.
***
Here we are, six days shy of five years later, and who but Shannon Bagley is running for office in our County? He wants to be the Sheriff! Right here in Nottingh-- sorry, Kalamazoo. See? He was a politician the whole time, a sheep in wolves' clothing.
I was over at my Dad's house a while ago, and I saw the glossy postcard on the kitchen table advertising his campaign. I explained who Candidate Bagley was and what all had happened with that.
An avid voter, Dad squinted and said, "What's the name?"
"Shannon Bagley."
He shook his head. "I never heard of her."
I shrugged and threw the postcard in the trash. I figure that's good enough.
pH 7.2o.2o
***
(Editor's note: She lost to incumbent Sheriff Richard Fuller.)
Monday, July 20, 2020
Friday, July 3, 2020
Requiem for a Dean
(Editor's Note: I softened the ending a bit.)
I was reading my local paper yesterday, which I rarely do anymore, as nothing has changed here since the end of the Nixon Administration. Perhaps I should pick it up more often, because I saw something in there that I would have missed had I not been turning the pages and getting ink on my fingers like in the old days, when I had a Kalamazoo Gazette paper route.
Hal Jenson is retiring, after ten years as...
What do you mean, "Who?" Hal Jenson. The Dean of WMed.
What do you mean you've never heard of WMed? Come on. In 2018, it was ranked as the 383rd-best medical school in the whole country. They just enrolled, what - 72 new students for 2020.
Hal is the only Dean they've ever had. And it's the only Dean he's ever been. He's walking away from a top-five salary as administrators go in the whole state of Michigan. Next year. That gives the University ample time to find a suitable replacement, whatever that might look like, however much it might cost.
I've seen some of Hal's emails. I know his mindset. Hopefully, WMed will use a little more discernment in choosing their next figurehead.
Like the Green Day song goes, I hope he had the time of his life. I hope he enjoyed ignoring my sister's desperate pleas for help as his employee, Joyce deJong, pinned back her ears and dug in her heels against our family's desire for the truth to be told about the circumstances surrounding my nephew's death. (Not the official pack of lies that they fought to keep Holy all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court.)
I hope he had a good time watching his dunce-cap underling send an email, which was meant for him, to me instead asking him to consider some kind of legal action or notice against me for blogging about this.
I hope it tickled his fancy, if he ever even knew, to find out that Joyce's shoppe had faxed key information to a certain funeral home owner who DID sue me (unsuccessfully) for defamation.
Primum non nocere; that is the oath they both swore, the oath they both violated when they trashed little Charlie Wolf's good name. So some of us will not miss Hal here in Kalamazoo County should his porters pack him up and carry him back to Utah, as they did at Mount Kilimanjaro a few years ago... See how much fun you can have on $400,000 a year?
Despite the fame and the money, though, he has apparently had enough. Hal's Grand Resume identifies him as an infectious diseases expert. As our tight-knit little community (where the fire hydrants sometimes don't work) grimly faces down COVID-19, he may well be looking to bag up his carpet and leave Kalamazoo.
And, frankly, who could blame him.
pH 7.o3.2o
***
I was reading my local paper yesterday, which I rarely do anymore, as nothing has changed here since the end of the Nixon Administration. Perhaps I should pick it up more often, because I saw something in there that I would have missed had I not been turning the pages and getting ink on my fingers like in the old days, when I had a Kalamazoo Gazette paper route.
Hal Jenson is retiring, after ten years as...
What do you mean, "Who?" Hal Jenson. The Dean of WMed.
What do you mean you've never heard of WMed? Come on. In 2018, it was ranked as the 383rd-best medical school in the whole country. They just enrolled, what - 72 new students for 2020.
Hal is the only Dean they've ever had. And it's the only Dean he's ever been. He's walking away from a top-five salary as administrators go in the whole state of Michigan. Next year. That gives the University ample time to find a suitable replacement, whatever that might look like, however much it might cost.
I've seen some of Hal's emails. I know his mindset. Hopefully, WMed will use a little more discernment in choosing their next figurehead.
Like the Green Day song goes, I hope he had the time of his life. I hope he enjoyed ignoring my sister's desperate pleas for help as his employee, Joyce deJong, pinned back her ears and dug in her heels against our family's desire for the truth to be told about the circumstances surrounding my nephew's death. (Not the official pack of lies that they fought to keep Holy all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court.)
I hope he had a good time watching his dunce-cap underling send an email, which was meant for him, to me instead asking him to consider some kind of legal action or notice against me for blogging about this.
I hope it tickled his fancy, if he ever even knew, to find out that Joyce's shoppe had faxed key information to a certain funeral home owner who DID sue me (unsuccessfully) for defamation.
Primum non nocere; that is the oath they both swore, the oath they both violated when they trashed little Charlie Wolf's good name. So some of us will not miss Hal here in Kalamazoo County should his porters pack him up and carry him back to Utah, as they did at Mount Kilimanjaro a few years ago... See how much fun you can have on $400,000 a year?
Despite the fame and the money, though, he has apparently had enough. Hal's Grand Resume identifies him as an infectious diseases expert. As our tight-knit little community (where the fire hydrants sometimes don't work) grimly faces down COVID-19, he may well be looking to bag up his carpet and leave Kalamazoo.
And, frankly, who could blame him.
pH 7.o3.2o
***
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Christmas Eve in July
I can't be sure of which year it was, but I lived on Glenrosa Street in Phoenix at the time, because I remember the oleander hedge. It could have been any Christmas Eve between 2001 and 2004.
Right at midnight, I woke up, for reasons having to do with excess consumption of holiday fare. While accomplishing that mission, I heard something awful through the open bathroom window, which prudently escaped into the lush back yard.
It was a great back yard. A great property overall, if you were hungry enough, with mature pecan and carob and tangelo trees literally dropping food on the ground much of the year.
The back yard was bermed for irrigation (it's a desert thing), and during the non-existent "winters" of the broiler-pan Southwest, the oleander hedges had no problem maintaining their vegetative dignity... You can make poison out of oleander, you know.
The back yard was fenced as well as hedged and it also had an alley behind it (for the service trucks). But you couldn't see the chain link fence through the towering oleander. It is a very bush-y, very stick-y thing, damn near impenetrable. Better security than a block wall.
But you could hear through it.
On one of those Christmas Eves, at midnight, through my bathroom window, across my back yard, on the other side of that oleander hedge, I could loudly and clearly hear someone sobbing his or her heart out.
I sat there, with gifts stacked under the benignly blinking Christmas tree on the other side of my interior wall, and a broken heart on display outside. It was such a plaintive and hopeless sound in the night that it did not even draw a response from the peacekeeper dog, Ox.
I did my part, I felt, by quietly closing the window - the kind with the hinges and the little crank - and going back to bed, humming Silent Night until foggily falling back asleep.
For a long time, for many years, I did not know what could cause such uncontrollable sorrow. Of course, now I know, and this month will slowly lead to the five-year "anniversary" of my nephew Charlie's accidental death.
There is no Christmas Tree this time of year. No tinsel strands or colorful strings of lights. No artfully wrapped presents waiting to be opened.
And humming Silent Night or anything else isn't going to work, isn't going to keep my sister's voice (or my own) out of my head. The sadness can't be muted by the closing of a window. It can't be blissfully ignored due to not yet being understood.
It's not on the other side of the oleander hedge.
pH 7.o1.2o
***
Right at midnight, I woke up, for reasons having to do with excess consumption of holiday fare. While accomplishing that mission, I heard something awful through the open bathroom window, which prudently escaped into the lush back yard.
It was a great back yard. A great property overall, if you were hungry enough, with mature pecan and carob and tangelo trees literally dropping food on the ground much of the year.
The back yard was bermed for irrigation (it's a desert thing), and during the non-existent "winters" of the broiler-pan Southwest, the oleander hedges had no problem maintaining their vegetative dignity... You can make poison out of oleander, you know.
The back yard was fenced as well as hedged and it also had an alley behind it (for the service trucks). But you couldn't see the chain link fence through the towering oleander. It is a very bush-y, very stick-y thing, damn near impenetrable. Better security than a block wall.
But you could hear through it.
On one of those Christmas Eves, at midnight, through my bathroom window, across my back yard, on the other side of that oleander hedge, I could loudly and clearly hear someone sobbing his or her heart out.
I sat there, with gifts stacked under the benignly blinking Christmas tree on the other side of my interior wall, and a broken heart on display outside. It was such a plaintive and hopeless sound in the night that it did not even draw a response from the peacekeeper dog, Ox.
I did my part, I felt, by quietly closing the window - the kind with the hinges and the little crank - and going back to bed, humming Silent Night until foggily falling back asleep.
For a long time, for many years, I did not know what could cause such uncontrollable sorrow. Of course, now I know, and this month will slowly lead to the five-year "anniversary" of my nephew Charlie's accidental death.
There is no Christmas Tree this time of year. No tinsel strands or colorful strings of lights. No artfully wrapped presents waiting to be opened.
And humming Silent Night or anything else isn't going to work, isn't going to keep my sister's voice (or my own) out of my head. The sadness can't be muted by the closing of a window. It can't be blissfully ignored due to not yet being understood.
It's not on the other side of the oleander hedge.
pH 7.o1.2o
***
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