Alexandra Luddy

A fifth-grader was killed the other day in an apparent murder-suicide. It appears that Alexandra Luddy, who attended Jeff Road Elementary School in Perinton, NY, and her grandfather were shot to death by the girl’s mother, who then proceeded to turn the gun on herself.

Her mother, Penelope Luddy, sent her husband out to check on an ill family member, and when he returned he was met by what most would see as any parent’s worst nightmare.

I think what gets to people most about this is just how, but lack of better terminology, “normal”, the woman was. Those who knew her remain in shock. Everyone’s been rattled, obviously. Mrs. Luddy seemed to be the perfect wife and mother; she was a room mom, a member of the PTSA, she helped out in the planning of school events whenever asked, she volunteered, and so on and so forth. So, as everyone seems to be thinking, what gave?

The local news service answered by saying plaintively, she was “distraught.”

So if she was, then, as the authorities so lightly put it, “distraught”, why didn’t anyone step in to do anything? There are only two explanations. Either no one noticed, suspected, say anything that could be tips toward her inner turmoil; or everyone knew and no one did a thing.

It’s happened in the past and it will happen again. Communities, parents, families, individuals don’t involve themselves, people look the other way, simply so that they don’t have to get involved. They don’t have to do anything. After all, there’s no self-interest in putting one’s self or family in danger just to help someone they may or may not even know all that well, right?

As may have been the mentality regarding this.

But that’s just a thought. It could have been, of course, that no one knew a thing. No one, absolutely no one, saw it coming. I don’t know whether I hope that’s the case or not. If it was, it goes to show just how little we know about each other as humans.

The nature of the crime suggests that it was premeditated. Mrs. Luddy asked her husband to leave the house, and then murdered her father, her daughter, and herself, which certainly would lead investigators to believe she was fully aware of what she was doing at the time.

But awareness does not imply clarity. I doubt there was any iota of clarity in her mind that morning.

“Maybe there were family problems…maybe it was self-loathing; she only killed from her own bloodline…maybe…perhaps…but it could’ve been…”

The point is, no one knows. People are terrified because they just don’t know. They don’t understand. And they’ll probably never understand, never get the opportunity to. I certainly don’t. I can only speculate.

My younger brother is in the sixth grade. He knows another boy who lives on Alexandra’s street. He was home that morning. He told my brother that he heard gunshots and a little girl screaming. My heart goes out to that boy, because chances are it’ll be years before he stops replaying those sounds in his head, if at all.

I hope his parents get him into trauma therapy or something. It would probably at least be good to look into.

I suppose that all in all, this whole thing just goes to show how very little we know about the human condition.

Cameron DeVeronica, 1997-2011

I am perfectly aware that the law is not elastic. I know that it cannot bend to suit every case, every circumstance, every instance where someone deserves to pay for what they’ve done. I can see, yes, that the concept of “cyber-bullying” is a sketchy topic to draw thick black marker lines around, a difficult crime to accurately pinpoint, but a crime nonetheless. Yes, there’s room for error. There’s room for error in any and all human-instituted laws and regulations, room for reasonable error, but under no circumstances, none whatsoever, should “reasonable error” ever result in suicide.

http://rochesterhomepage.net/fulltext?nxd_id=285297

She was only fourteen; a freshman attending high school in Spencerport, NY. Her peers said she was nice, pretty, smart, treated everyone around her well. Is that true? I don’t know. I didn’t know her. But I don’t think it matters, either. She deserves the same amount of respect and mourning as anyone else who dies at such a young age, regardless of who she was when she was alive. It’s a shame.

What really the police gets me, though, about the whole thing, is the response from the local authorities. Despite the fact that in another news broadcast that every single kid at her school they interviewed said her death had to do with bullying, the police still manage to stand there and say that “there is no clear or solid evidence directing us to the point where this is a hate crime, bullying, or cyber bullying; things may change but nothing is pushing us in a direction at this time.” Really? Really, ladies and gentlemen? Hundreds of comments on each post on her memorial page on Facebook regarding how she was being harassed doesn’t qualify as “clear or solid evidence”? Direct witness accounts from her fellow students commenting on how she was bullied, that’s not “clear or solid evidence”? Oh, I’m sorry. I guess the police are just waiting for someone to walk into the police department, like, “Hey, what’s up? I harassed Cameron pretty consistently, right up ’till she did herself in. Well, I guess you can cuff me now, huh?” Likely story.

After her death, as previously mentioned, a memorial page was set up for Cameron on Facebook, drawing in thousands of comments and likes from around the area and around the world. Evidently, and some of these posts can still be seen on the page, a group of “unidentified individuals”, most likely kids at her school, made fake profiles and continued to post hateful comments on her memorial page. The police mentioned this nowhere in any of their interviews and press conferences. Hm. I guess they just forgot that bit.

If I’m not mistaken, an IP scan can be run, by the police, to trace back those fake profiles to the computers they were made from. Now, I know that the Facebook terms of use may have some legal issues with this, so I won’t expand on why they should or shouldn’t be doing it (though of course they should), but that’s entirely different from not informing the public of the fact that those comments and profiles were there.

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20111202/NEWS01/112020353/Spencerport-bullying-Cameron-DeVeronica-police

This “hush hush” policy regarding bullying has gone too far. There is a huge problem when the number one priority of the local authorities is to “quell rumours” (which are hardly rumours) rather than trying to validate or invalidate them.

I’ll name no names and give no details for the family’s sake, but I know of someone, a boy I believe a year older than Cameron who killed himself recently, due to bullying. The last text message he received before he pulled the trigger was, “Are you still alive?” plus or minus text speak. The police, who could just so easily have talked to the boy who sent that text message, told his parents what he did, did nothing. They didn’t so much as mention  this boy’s name during the course of the investigation. At this boy’s school, the school did nothing, the police did nothing, and no one will talk about it.

So how can they expect this to stop?