There is an occasionally-expressed sentiment that we run across in our Sisyphean struggle, a variant of, "Why can't you just let it go?" It's tempting to take offense to that, even if the utterer is unaware of his or her idiocy in the moment.
My answer is always short and simple: Kalamazoo County is not telling the truth in the case of Dennis Charles Wolf. Nobody here wants anything more than honesty (yet). Public officials are employees. Who among us would tolerate our workers lying to our faces?
Secondarily, of course, is the noble notion of not wanting to see this happen to anybody else. But it's hard to fly that flag in this place, where fresh winds seldom fill our sails. Such things become harder to justify when you know it's been done before.
Erik Cross was a kid about the same age as I was when he was killed in 1983, run over by a car as he walked home from a party on an otherwise-normal summer night in Southwest Michigan. His family believes it was a case of horrifying murder. They seek justice to this very day.
Seems they can't let it go.
And I don't blame 'em.
What they are up against is more monstrous than what we've experienced. Imagine living with the knowledge that your loved one's vicious killer still roams free (for the most part).
They're not shy about exposing the details, either. My sister and I got sued for exposing someone's disturbing criminal history - in Michigan they call that defamation - but Erik's Army is a bit more strident, a bit more explicit than that.
I completely understand their reasons for being this way. They've run into the same roadblocks that we run into, year after year. It basically amounts to a cowardly County prosecutor who isn't about to take on any case that he doesn't know for sure he can win. (In other words, one against White people.)
For their part, Michigan's Attorney General's office did no more for the Cross family than they did for my family (less, actually). They, too, may not want to actually work. The cream of the Slacker Generation crop, they prefer to cash their checks, gobble down their meals and look good in the papers... All for rather handsome pay.
Erik Cross deserves justice. So does my nephew. But Jeff Getting doesn't have to do his job. He ran unopposed. Nobody else wants to be him, or anything like him.
It should all make you wonder: Why would anybody want to live here? Absent justice for those who deserve it, there is no answer to that question, and none of us can afford to feel safe. Or whole.
pH 2.19.21
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