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Friday, November 9, 2012

When War Comes Home and reporters notice some of them

It seems as if reporters like to report more on stories like this while missing so much. In this article Kristof says "we're seeing more suicides" but the problem is that one key work of "seeing" instead of acknowledging. When other generations of veterans came home they were experiencing the same things but it was not until Vietnam veterans and fought for this nation to "see" them that anything got done to address it. The problem was reporters back then had the luxury of lack of information and they were able to focus on what they wanted to. Now we have the internet and a global, historical information to know better. They were still killing themselves but reporters focused more on the crimes some committed than what the rest of them were going through.

When War Comes Home
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 9, 2012

A DECORATED combat veteran, Staff Sgt. Dwight L. Smith Jr. seemed the perfect soldier. Until, that is, he visited his family in Delaware last Christmas and, as he later told the police, “clicked on.” Inexplicably one morning, while driving his bright red Hummer on a public street, he ran down a 65-year-old woman, Marsha Lee, as she walked her dog, according to police accounts. Then, as a witness watched, he got out and threw Ms. Lee, injured and screaming, into the back seat and drove off.

Ms. Lee’s body, naked except for socks, was found discarded in a wooded area half a mile away. Her head had been bashed in with a heavy, sharp object, perhaps a rock. The police later established that she had been raped.

Police officers searched frantically for the Hummer, and that evening they arrested Sergeant Smith as he drove such a vehicle, still spattered with blood. A police affidavit says that Sergeant Smith admitted to the slaying that night, explaining that he had decided that he “wanted to kill someone.”

Ms. Lee was much loved in the community, for she had devoted herself nearly full time to local causes like an animal shelter and a home for the elderly. Her funeral was one of the biggest anyone can remember in Delaware, and the town has honored her by giving her street a second name: Marsha Lee Way. Her husband, Scottie Lee, declined to speak to me at the request of prosecutors. But family friends see this as straightforward: a case of a young man committing an act of pure evil.
read more from the New York Times

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