Last night, I was cruising through tumblr.com. It is a blogosphere where people post videos, pictures, poetry, prose, GIFs, sound bites, and other miscellaneous things. While usually for fun, sometimes it is a platform for human rights, particularly gay rights, or current events and users reactions to it. But yesterday, something was different about what I saw on my dashboard (,which is kind of like a person's personal homepage on tumblr).
I saw a sound player with captions about how what people heard from the sound player was not real. So of course my curiosity was peaked and I had to listen to whatever sound bite these people were talking about. I expected something really cool, or something the people of tumblr thought was really cool. Perhaps a mashup from the boys of One Direction or a song from quotes by Regina George would be what I would hear.
It was not. Instead, at first I heard nothing which made me think that I hadn't pushed play. Then right as i was about to try again, I heard a voice say,"This is 9-1-1. What is your emergency?" And the rest of the twenty minute sound bite was a real call to 911 from a seventeen year old boy that had just killed his mother and his sister 30 minutes prior.
Wait, what? That was my first reaction. But the boy was so calm about everything. And the 911 operator was as well. If someone had called me about killing someone, I would probably not have handled the whole situation as eloquently as she did. The entire time, the boy kind of tried to explain that he had been thinking about killing - anyone, really- for a while now and he just wanted his mom and sister to be in as little pain as possible as they were dying.
And the 911 operator sounded so understanding the whole time. She empathized with the boy. She assured him that everything would be okay, that he would find the help he needed. Even when the boy talked about how messed up he was going to be.
Wait, what?
I thought again. He had two more sisters and a father that were on away. They were going to have to get phone calls in the middle of the night saying that his son, their brother, had killed two members of their family. The grandparents who lived across the street had to hear the same news. Yet, all he could think about was how this was going to mess him up.
Throughout the whole conversation, I don't think that he truly understood the weight of what he had just done carried. He said that he didn't like the feeling of knowing he had just killed people. The fact that they were dead didn't seem to bother him, but that he had killed him. Through the whole thing, he seemed selfish, but not a monster. Listening to the tape, I felt almost sorry for him. It wasn't that he lived in a super abusive home, or it didn't sound that way. The way he described his home life was that his family was just rude to each other, and he didn't like that. He said that was why he killed them.
But there was no anger in his voice. There was no sadness. It was so so strange. For the family, I don't even know what I would feel. If my brother had done something like this, I would just be sad. But I don't know all of the details around the situation, so can't say what it would be like for his family. All I know is that this going to be a very difficult time, for the family and the boy. And all I can say is that I want to keep them in my prayers.
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