No Justice for Nadine

The following news report talks about the acquittal of two young culture-enrichers in Germany. The two men had been accused of raping a young woman named Nadine Munster, but the victim committed suicide as a result of the rape years before a judgment was handed down in court. Lacking a living witness to the crime, the judges felt compelled to render a not-guilty verdict.

The faces of the alleged perpetrators have pixelated in this video, but they haven’t been “pinkwashed”, so that it’s obvious they’re black Africans. Their names are distinctly non-Muslim, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that they are converts, like the murderers of Lee Rigby in London. The fact that one of them said, “Only God can punish people. OK?” is intriguing — is it based on Islamic theology? Or is it an offbeat interpretation of Christian doctrine?

Many thanks to Oz-Rita for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Transcript:

00:02   You are guilty, it is because of you that my daughter took her own life.
00:06   The daughter
00:10   of this woman was raped and committed suicide after the deed. In front of the
00:14   courthouse the mother meets the suspects once more.
00:18   You don’t need to run away
00:22   Crap justice — You are murderers!
00:26   You are murderers, because my daughter is dead because of you.
00:30   Our reporter Kirstin von Kals tells the tragic
00:34   story behind these scenes. The family,
00:38   the divorced parents and the siblings, are desperate. The accused
00:42   are cool. Do you have a guilty conscience? Do you think sometimes about this? Only God can punish, OK?
00:47   Only God, all clear?!
00:51   The process for the alleged rape of Nadine Munster, a process that
00:55   attracts a lot of attention and leaves behind a lot of pain, a pain
00:59   which the divorced parents handle very differently. Will the men who raped my daughter
01:03   really be acquitted? That’s the main question in Volker Munster’s thinking.
01:07   One and a half years ago a part of him died, his daughter, Nadine.
01:11   Volker Munster is a desperate man, but he is incredibly calm and brave.
01:15   I feel that again, when I meet him a few days before the verdict
01:19   at his home. Last summer we reported about him and the process concerning the rape of his daughter,
01:23   a process which is threatening to
01:27   finally destroy him. How did it go during these past months
01:31   since we met last? Nothing at all has changed.
01:35   Volker Munster, desperate father. It remains
01:39   still that she
01:43   is fully present in my thoughts and
01:47   I miss her terribly.
01:51  
01:55   It’s…
01:59   it is so
02:03   that I think I will need a very long time to even learn how
02:07   to live with it. Everything begins in December 2007
02:11   The successful student, Nadine, meets Colin Y. in a Lubeck Disco.
02:15   They flirt. Eventually she joins him in his flat for coffee.
02:19   There a second man is waiting, Isaac B. “Then the two men
02:23   raped me for many hours,” Nadine told her father.
02:27   Eight months after the rape Nadine can bear it no longer. Although she is in
02:31   psychological treatment, she flees into her death.
02:35   On that afternoon…
02:39   somewhat I felt it… it was…
02:43  
02:47   (unclear)
02:51   Well…
02:56   Then on her table,
03:00   a big bottle of soda and an empty package of 85 sleeping pills was found.
03:04   Nadine made several statements
03:08   about her rape to the police. Despite this, there are legal problems,
03:12   as Volker Munster’s lawyer explained already during the summer. Both men had
03:16   been detained and interrogated directly after the fact, but there were investigative glitches,
03:20   For example no clear concept during the interrogation. The mobile video of the deed is not
03:24   Clear, and the most important witness is missing, because she is dead.
03:28   An opportunity for the accused? When I experience the young men
03:32   who are accused of a second rape, some months ago in court,
03:36   I am shocked by their attitude. They insult and threaten me and
03:40   my camera team in the courthouse, where we are not allowed to film. With unambiguous gestures
03:44   they make it abundantly clear what language they speak.
03:48   To face them repeatedly in the courtroom is almost unbearable already during the summer
03:52   for Volker Munster.
03:56   I must control myself that, on one hand
04:00   I don’t start to cry, on the other hand not perhaps attack them.
04:04   They grin, they laugh about certain statements
04:08   that are made here. They don’t take it seriously. That must be unbearable…
04:12   for you, no? Yes it is. Until the time
04:16   of our first reportage, all accused are free. Notwithstanding
04:20   their criminal records which range from violent assault to aggravated theft.
04:24   But after our broadcast some things are moving
04:28   so Mr. Munster tells me during our new meeting.
04:32   What has happened since our last report?
04:36   Well, at least we had
04:40   a reaction from the court after
04:45   the broadcast, and
04:49   one of the accused
04:53   is even back in custody, which I think
04:57   your report helped,
05:01   but it was also said that he
05:05   had violated his parole. Would Nadine have been reassured by that?
05:09   At least twice a week the father visits his child
05:13   at the cemetery. And whenever he stands at the grave of his daughter,
05:17   he painfully realises that she is really and irrevocably dead.
05:21   In the end I am even happy that
05:25   Nadine did not have to live through this whole Summorium
05:29   with this process. For her it would surely have been
05:33   even much worse. Do you fear
05:37   that once the judgment has been handed down, you will have to stand here
05:41   and tell her: “They have not been punished”?
05:45  
05:49   Of course.
05:53   It is just unimaginable.
05:57   On the day of sentencing, Volker Munster does not make it to the court of Lubeck. It is too much
06:01   for him. But many of Nadine’s friends are there, also her best friend
06:05   Pia. All are afraid of an acquittal and Nadine’s mother,
06:09   who lives separately from Volker Munster, enters the courthouse for the first time.
06:13   Until now she did not have the strength to speak with us, now it is her wish.
06:17   What is happening within you at the moment? It hurts.
06:21   Marion Munster, Nadine’s mother. Somehow I am afraid.
06:25   I want
06:29   to look at those people
06:33   who did this to our daughter. You know
06:38   that the probability of an acquittal is high, how do you deal with that?
06:42   Very difficult, because I do not understand it.
06:46   Now that my
06:50   daughter is no longer, that they should get an acquittal,
06:54   that is unjust. A few minutes
06:58   before the verdict, Colin Y. arrives at last at the Court.
07:02   Do you regret what you did, do you feel guilty?
07:06   Yes or no?
07:10   Do you have a guilty conscience, do you think about it sometimes?
07:14   Only God can punish people. OK? Only God, everything clear?
07:18   Tschau.
07:22   “In dubio pro reo”, in doubt for the accused, so decides the Lubeck Regional Court.
07:26   The rape of Nadine Munster cannot be proved.
07:30   Acquittal for the accused. Incomprehensible, not only for the family,
07:34   but also for Nadine’s best friend, Pia. You now have heard
07:38   the judgment and the reasoning of the court, and all the doubts
07:42   the Court has about Nadine’s statements. When you hear all that, do you start to doubt?
07:46   No. For me there is no doubt
07:50   that it was rape. I witnessed her on the same day, shortly after.
07:54   Knowing people for so long, we knew each other for about ten years,
07:58   I can assess thoroughly how she felt and what she must have experienced.
08:02   What do you say about the verdict? I cannot understand it.
08:06   I cannot understand on the basis that
08:10   the perpetrators get public (assistance?), and
08:14   let me say it this way: Taxes are being invested
08:18   for their integration and (they get offered programs?),
08:22   while I ask myself the question: where is the help for
08:26   the victims, for the family? An appeal is unlikely,
08:30   Volker Munster does not have the strength. He must now try
08:35   to finally find closure, after he has told his dead daughter
08:39   that those men she met on that fatal night in December 2007,
08:43   have been acquitted of (any) guilt.
 

30 thoughts on “No Justice for Nadine

  1. Angela’s rules. Free heroin and all the gang banging Ali and Mohound can handle. The longer this goes on the more one realizes what a real monster Merkel is. In time the consequences of her blind fanaticism may make Hitler pale – just a little. “Yes! Mahound was my lover. He made me do it!”

  2. Dec 2007. Already with criminal records and on public assistance.

    Highly placed people have known exactly what they have been causing for a long time. Decades most likely. Long before the invitation for a million more. They do not care.

    I would like to respect authority but we can all plainly see how well that works. Merkel, in office since 2005, almost 11 years. Does any one recall a problem she has solved?

      • Alec MacColl, Still (and Yet)…

        When you say “clearly, the voters have not cared either”…I agree with you. We are drowning in an epidemic of not caring. Your words reminded me of John Donne’s meditation, later made into a poem:

        No man is an island,
        Entire of itself,
        Every man is a piece of the continent,
        A part of the main.
        If a clod be washed away by the sea,
        Europe is the less.
        As well as if a promontory were.
        As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
        Or of thine own were:
        Any man’s death diminishes me,
        Because I am involved in mankind,
        And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
        It tolls for thee.

        This woman’s girl’s death led to the ruination of her family because no one really cared enough to carry some of the suffering for them.

        That callous rape was all too sadly due to this young woman’s abysmal judgement. She did not deserve to be raped, nor did her parents raise her on purpose to not to have enough emotional resilience to live through to an eventual healing. Shame can kill you.

        This website exists because my daughter died heedlessly and needlessly. She lived in terrible pain all the time. Some of it was due to three kinds of migraines (the things you learn from the chronically ill! – I never knew there was more than one type). She was given methadone to try, to see if it would relieve her pain. Her “boyfriend” immediately helped himself to some of her medication and was angry that he didn’t “get off” on it. He may have encouraged her to take more than a safe dosage, as he had done. And she died in her sleep from that “more-than-safe” amount because her body was weakened to begin with.

        My family doctor (whom she had seen two days before her death) ordered a copy of the autopsy. In our state, all sudden deaths are required to have an autopsy by law. And by law, my doctor could receive a copy since she’d seen my daughter in a clinic visit. The findings showed a mortal dose of methadone in her liver.

        According to my doctor, the boyfriend, who wasn’t chronically ill and whose immune system wasn’t compromised by Lyme Disease as hers was, could survive a larger dose. At the family visiting night, the evening before her funeral, he bragged – deliberately loudly enough so that I could hear it – that he’d taken the medicine too. “Nasty stuff”, he said, “messes up your stomach.” Then he laughed.

        This man was/is without any ethics. He used her disability checks, he sponged off her. I once loaned my daughter my credit card so she could get new tires in order to have him drive her to the hospital. He copied the card number and used it, while she was hospitalized, to run a series of personals ad in our local community paper, looking for a new girl friend. When my credit card statement came in and I saw a 900 phone number, I knew what it was. We were able to look up his ad and so reported him to the police. He was tried and found guilty. He had to pay me back the money, plus court costs, plus 35 hours of “community service”. I suppose he planted bushes or something for the Parks Department.

        After her death, he kept her car. I couldn’t get the police to retrieve it so that it could be sold and whatever money came of it could be divided among her children. The car had originally been mine and I’d given it to her when we could afford such gestures.

        I did get some small satisfaction, though. I happened to be in town some months later and discovered that a Commonwealth Attorney (like a District Attorney in other states) I’d worked with closely back during my social work days had returned from Virginia Beach and resumed his old position. So I went to John and told him the whole sad tale re this scum my daughter had taken up with and its eventual outcome. He looked up the file (not showing it to me since it was state business) and assured me that he’d flagged this piece of — well, I won’t repeat what John called him but he was now on full alert. Should the BF have to return to court for some other charge (and John said petty criminals like this always do) then he (John) would take special care with the case…

        …I didn’t need the specifics. From our long association in our work, I knew it was taken care of. I didn’t need anything else.

        Frankly, it grieved me that justice had not been done by the police, that this man who ignorantly encouraged my daughter to take more methadone with him so they could “get high” also took all her belongings after her death and the police refused to act – they made it plain that I was merely a troublesome mother…even though this man was well-known to the police for a past of petty, stupid crimes.

        As the Baron said in another context, “justice must be seen to be done”. With my Commonwealth Attorney friend on the job in District Court, I knew – I know – that eventually justice will be served.
        ——————–
        A long sad story to say that as much as we miss my daughter’s laughter, her wonderful wit and her sometimes stunningly intuitive wisdom, we also know that she was an agent in her own death. Just as Nadine demonstrated abysmal judgement in going back to that rapist’s apartment, my own daughter had been doing such things her whole adult life. She never “grew out of it”…we had a crisis or drama on the average of every six weeks from the age of seventeen or so until her death on May 8 2003. Two decades of infinitely wearing anguish. And sometimes my daughter knew she was deeply flawed. During what turned out to be her final hospital admission, she asked me how she could go about getting an exorcism…I promised her I’d find out but she didn’t live long enough to try that path.

        Since then, I have learned the body’s wisdom. Sometimes it *knows* when it cannot ever heal. Sometimes death is a kind of ‘cure’ – though it sure isn’t for the children left behind.

        I am luckier than Nadine’s family: I have had the Baron holding my hand through the valley of the shadow of death. No one will ever convince me he’s not a saint for hanging in there with me through all of it. Yes, my favorite job is polishing his halo every week. It’s the least I can do.

        It took the huge hole in our lives caused by Shelagh’s death to lead us to the idea of a blog. As I’ve said before, the B to wanted a way to keep our conversation going while he was away at work. With a blog, we could be present to one another during those long weekday stretches. Had Shelagh not died, we’d never have had the time to devote to this work: we’d still be in chronic crisis mode, putting out those fires.
        ————-
        Unless and until families start pulling together, educating themselves and their pre-adolescent daughters about the dangers of public places, of public intoxication, of the stupidity of careless undeserved trust of strangers, there will be more Nadines. Most of them won’t suicide, but some will. There are millions of Nadines all over the world getting dressed to go out tonight to some bar to “have a good time”. A tiny minority won’t make it back home unharmed. An even tinier minority won’t make it back at all.

        The Baron once pointed out to me that my daughter did not respect my parenting. He thought it had been undermined when she was small and saw the abuse and chaos and made a determination not to EVER be like that. Her younger brother respected my parental boundary and as a result he made different, better choices for himself. He also taught me what it meant to admire your kids as they mature.

        I wonder what Nadine would’ve said about her respect (not love, it’s never about love. My daughter loved me deeply) for her parents. I feel great sadness for this family. They have a long hard row to hoe. And, yes, they remain a family, even though divorced, and even though one member is now permanently gone. The hole she left cannot be erased by any of them.

        • I am intensely sorry about the grief you have been given. I can think only of the words from a writing you surely know as well as John Donne; “Words cannot utter it.”

          • It’s an old grief by now. Shelagh is far happier, to my way of thinking, than she ever was here. I remember her asking the parish priest, when she was eight years old, if he believed in Purgatory. When he replied that he did, she said, (as you can imagine, rather sadly): “Yes, Father, I do too. I think Purgatory is right here”. I can’t describe the look he gave me…so now she’s not in Purgatory any more. Good for her!

            When I woke up the morning following the day she’d died, I heard her voice very clearly. She was laughing and said, teasingly, “So, Mom, what are you going to do on this first day of the rest of your life without me?” I told her I had no idea…

        • There are some interesting, even deep ideas there, Dymphna – about respect versus love, and about the profound acceptance that sometimes death is a release for the tormented. As a father of a headstrong daughter – now mercifully in recovery – I can relate.

          Life is fragile, and for some souls calm and serenity are elusive. Food for thought indeed, on a cold, bracing night. Regards,

  3. Dymphna,

    I have read the story of your namesake and yet I still do not really understand why you chose it. I am sorry for your loss; especially for the circumstances surrounding it. As a father I find it difficult to imagine how others can be so calm when faced with such tragedy. I am not a violent man, yet reading the account of these monsters who preyed upon the young woman and drove her to her death, I am filled with overwhelming rage and want nothing more than to visit the justice upon them which the legal system has denied her father.

    A dispassionate examination of the situation says that this is being allowed to happen, even encouraged; that the heads of state such as Merkel and Cameron, and the puppetmasters such as Soros behind them are just as complicit in her death as the two rapists. And no one is brought to justice. Or ever will be.

    I can take comfort in the knowledge that after the Armenian genocide, many of those responsible were later hunted down and executed; that not all sins went unpunished in this lifetime. It doesn’t bring the dead back to life, but how could a man remain a man who didn’t try to avenge the cruel deaths of his own flesh and blood?

    • Lots of questions in your response; it’s hard to know which to address. Let’s begin at the end:

      A dispassionate examination of the situation says that this is being allowed to happen, even encouraged; that the heads of state such as Merkel and Cameron, and the puppetmasters such as Soros behind them are just as complicit in her death as the two rapists. And no one is brought to justice.

      You can’t start there. If families are going to “work” in the old-fashioned sense of families – i.e., that they prepared their children to enter the world of adults and take their place among the adults. That means schooling, working, and eventually establishing one’s own home.

      Do we do that anymore? Or do children escape to the hedonism of university, long alcoholic binges, and what is called “the hook-up culture”? How does four years of *that* prepare anyone for adulthood?

      Nadine’s world view began to be formed as she learned to walk…she then had the potential to move about on her own. Wise parents keep a close eye on their children and on their activities outside the home. An 18 year old, raised to fear “racism” as THE mortal sin, is being avant garde (she thinks, in her alcohol-fueled haze) when she toddles along to an apartment of a black man she doesn’t know, that her family doesn’t know, and when they are finished with her, she doesn’t have the emotional resilience (nor do her parents, obviously) to heal, to move past a deep lapse in judgement on her own part to find some kind of reformed balance in her life.

      “Therapy” isn’t often an answer for that kind of trauma. Group help – the company of other girls likewise afflicted, led by a wise facilitator – can be vital to survival. It’s crucial to know you’re not the only one and that you can find or create your own resilience to get through the aftermath of trauma. The presence in her life of a strong father who is fully present to his daughter in her pain is also vital…his own revenge can come later, after his child has healed and moved on to take up her life again. Mothers are important too, but for a girl of 18, her father is of primary help. My daughter didn’t have that necessary component.

      Monica Lewinsky gave a talk on Shame, on being shamed, on living with shame and wanting to die. Now at 40 or so, she’s managed to make a life of her own. I think her father helped her.

      At the University of Virginia you can watch the toxic culture on almost any night. Drunken co-eds roam the streets; it’s cool to be intoxicated. Two of them were murdered by a local (he lives in the next county) black fellow who has evidently done this in many towns in the state. IOW, a serial killer. You can tell from the CTV tapes that at least one of the girls showed poor judgement in staggering off with this dread-locked fellow she didn’t know. But it’s cool to be “nice” to black men. It shows you’re not a racist.

      Meanwhile, instead of addressing the alcohol bingeing (the Emergency Room is full of alcohol-poisoned kids on weekends and some don’t make it), we have a rabid “rape culture” sham in which men are blamed for women’s inebriation. To say it’s out of control is not only an understatement, it’s a perversion of reality. That campus, and many like it, needs a robust AA program aimed at adolescents suddenly freed from the home rules. Instead, the alcoholism and subsequent tragedies are allowed to happen and the administration is complicit because what if they pulled in the reins and kids started yelling about their freedoms??

      Children are running their families. Their subsequent tragedies are ruining said families who break under the weight.

      • Dymphna,

        I agree with you that ultimate responsibility for one’s actions lies with oneself; when we are too young and immature to make wise decisions for ourself then our guardians should be there and exercise good judgement for us. To call what has happened to the traditional family a tragedy is a gross understatement. Maybe the idealized family of the Waltons and Andy Griffith was just that; idealized. And to imagine that young single men and women never “hooked up” is hopelessly naive. Yet, the lack of shame and the flaunting of one’s lack of morals and sound judgement is something new and unparalleled. One sees it everywhere in all the institutions of society, the contempt for tradional values. From the encouragement of female promiscuity and the denigration of traditional marriage, and the portrayal of the husband or man of the house as a weak, bumbling buffoon seen in most network sitcoms, to the ease with which a woman can divorce and take everything from her husband, including access to his children even if she is openly living with her lover, the deck is stacked against those who want to raise their children to be responsible and productive adults with sound judgement.

        In my own life, I am the separated father of a young boy who spends most of his time outside of school with the live-in lover of his mom while she is at work in the evening. For me, I must work two jobs including the night shift at my primary job simply out of economic necessity. I pay for his private schooling at a religious school because I believe strongly that a quality education in the three R’s is essential to his future. And because I believe a knowledge of christian principles will benefit him later in life. Since I cannot be there physically in his life as much as I would like, it is the best I can do. I can work less and maybe see him more, but in this day and age one needs two incomes just to keep ahead of poverty, of living in slums and the bad influences found there. Divorce also divorces the son from his father and from learning how to be a man from a man. I cannot even imagine how much worse it must be for a young adolescent girl to not have a father in her life.

        The western world is turned upside down and the craziness is so pervasive one cannot help but think that it is by design. I feel like a stranger in a strange land; like I am living in a nightmare. It is good to know that others feel the same frustrations and that one is not alone in their thoughts.

        And yes, I would love to hear how you and Baron came to choose your nom de guerres…

        • Your story is heart-rending. When we make the wrong choice in a mate, it echoes down the generations – our children, their kids, and so on. Broken families are a major, huge, unadmitted tragedy and it started with the deaths of so many alpha males in Europe (and to a lesser extent in the U.S.) in two bloody world wars. You could also include the 700,000+ who died in America’s Civil War, the long series of internecine battles that Europe studied as war became “modern and mechanized”.

          You ARE living in a nightmare, but at least you know that. If you want some ideas on how to maintain regular, low-level contact with your son – contact unlikely to cause trouble – email me. Sadly, I’m an expert. Also, to reinforce the wisdom you’ve attained, I recommend reading almost anything by George Gilder.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gilder

          He’s an economist who looks at the microcosm first.

          Men and Marriage

          Here’s one review:

          This book received a lot of flack when it first came out. The demand for equality among men and women was finally being accepted as a proper ideal for a civilized society, and anyone who disagreed was deservedly shouted down. But amidst the great din, it was presumed with terrible shallowness that any thoughtful challenge was traitorous activity (This, unfortunately, is often still the case.) George Gilder was one of the first to point out that ‘equality’ does not mean ‘sameness’, that acknowledging the equality of women does not mean that men and women think, feel, or ought to act, in the same ways, or that it is ‘bad’ to examine the question of whether there might be gender roles that are indeed sensible, virtuous, and possibly even wonderful. As we look back over the years since the feminist movement began, we cannot honestly say that the changes we have made have made everyone happy. It is worth going back and taking a calm, thoughtful, fresh look at the challenges that George Gilder raised in this book.

          Gilder was responsible for helping the ideas of supply side economics spread – for a brief while, until the socialists shredded it. If they hadn’t their huge welfare apparatus would’ve had to be dismantled and the underclass would have stopped growing. Then who would vote for them? The truly prosperous – those who have not made their money via the government – reject socialism and always will. They, like Gilder, understand the limits of any good that government can do.

          Socialism is a zero-sum game. Free-market capitalism, otoh, is based on the belief that prosperity is a natural state when people are left alone to create. Free markets are based on the idea of plenty; socialism on scarcity.

      • Dyphna, your grief seems too enormous for me to know what to say. The situation you describe seems unimaginably horrible to me.

        The problem with college is that everyone is told all about their “rights” and not enough about reality. The impression students are given is that as long as they have a “right” to do whatever that it must be fine. A campus administration isn’t going to do anything about anything unless the university might get sued or they’re otherwise in danger of suffering some sort of loss. They can’t be expected to raise a finger to protect anyone unless it’s a coincidence where that just happens to also be what protects the university from risk of loss.

        With regard to the rape culture thing, women are told that they “have a right to have fun” instead of being told about risks and consequences. Anyone talking about risks and consequences tends to get accused to trying to “control women”, accused of “blaming the victim”, and accused of denying them their “right to have fun”. It’s ridiculous that people think that inventing new “rights” for themselves is going to prevent bad stuff from happening, but that attitude seems way too common. Whatever “rights” they want to invent, antisocial people will always ignore them.

        I don’t have much hope that a university bureaucracy will solve anything. Whatever they do it will be for the benefit of the university and not for the students.

        • If parents do the job ahead of time to prepare their kids, they’ll find “pockets of sanity” in which to dwell. A local family sent their first child off to college last fall. Per the high school guidance counselor she just had to go to UVa because it has such “prestige” (makes the high school stats look good). Since she’s going to be the first college grad on either side of the family, they listened to the guidance counselor and let her go since much of it is being funded by grants and small scholarships. Now, even after all this time, most weekends her mother or father drives into town to pick her up because she finds the weekends ugly and evil. Then on Sunday evening they trek back in. She was able to find a Christian college group and joined that – it provides some safe structure for weekends.

          They’ve made plans to get her off campus into a large rental with other like-minded girls for next year. It’s a shame, though, that this family got sold a bill of goods on the corrupt UVa. She would have been far happier in a smaller school (UVa has 40,000 students). Since her ultimate goal is to be a physical therapist, she doesn’t need all the bells and whistles a multi-disciplined college university offers. But with her strong family, she’ll at least survive.

          I’m buying a used copy of Gavin de Becker’s book for her and her parents to read. *Every* young girl setting off needs to know what he has to say:

          Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane)

          There are about twenty versions of this book, updated a number of times since I first read it in 1998. It’s good for the families of young boys, too.

          When you say that whatever a university will do it will be for the benefit of the school and not for the students, you’ve stated the main truth of today corrupt edu-corp. From the sale of books (huge money there) to the inflated salaries of the professors with tenure to the impoverishment of every other category of worker in those grease machines, they will eventually fall of their own corrupt weight. But not before ruining a lot of young lives, both boys and girls (they are NOT men and women yet).

          For those facing the grim prospect of “higher” education for their kids, here’s an invaluable list:

          http://www.thebestschools.org/rankings/20-best-conservative-colleges-america/

          The first school on that list is probably the best known among conservative educators: Hillsdale College in Michigan. Doesn’t accept federal aid. There are a couple of those on that list. They were letting women and blacks in generations ago…

          [..if it hadn’t been so far away I’d have pushed for it for our son. But he wanted to go to his dad’s school, where his family had gone for some generations…and it had the advantage of being here in Virginia.

          …but it had turned into a leftist hole since his father’s day. It took a while, but he found ways to make it work: getting libertarian roommates, joining a music fraternity – Sinfonia, I think. Still, it was four years of ranting feminists with a few bright spots: taking the ROTC military history classes though his asthma kept him out of the service. The Rotsies would ask, mistified, “so tell me why, if you don’t have to take this class, you *want* to?” The short answer was he’d been a military history buff since he could read…and on occasion would argue a point or two with the “professor” – a captain in the Army. Fortunately, the guy enjoyed the challenge from this uppity kid who admired him for his military service.]

          When our whole infrastructure falls, the mega schools will implode.

          There’s another list somewhere -Niche – but I couldn’t find it. IIRC, it lists hundreds of them.

    • I have read the story of your namesake and yet I still do not really understand why you chose it.

      I’ve written about that name, suggested by the Baron, so many times I don’t think I can do it again. However, you’ve given me a good idea: both the Baron and I should write a short essay on our names and how we came to choose them. In many ways, his is more interesting than mine. For example, google Baron Bodissey Jack Vance. I’ll bet there’s even a wiki on it since Vance died not too long ago.

      We could put the essays on the same page in our archived pages for easy retrieval.

  4. My earlier response was much wordier. Then I made an unusual mistake, my hand just abruptly erased it all without my consent. There are a lot of things beyond me to understand, but my prayer list does keep getting longer.

  5. Dymphna
    One thing I have been doing is giving each of the kids I count as my own a copy of their own of The Chronicles of Narnia. On to the next generation. This time around, I hope to read it to each of them. Or some of it. I do wonder how I’ll answer questions about the last story though. C.S.L. did not do easy things. I had not specifically thought of this as a preventative, and it may not be, but it may be a way to tell the kids of things I do and do not understand. I am grateful that there are many people wiser than I from whom I may borrow.

    • There was a very interesting movie about 15 years ago that examined exactly that process — the way in which a father (with the support and collaboration of the mother) plotted and executed revenge on the man responsible for killing their child, when the judicial system failed them. Justice had to be seen to be done.

      I can’t remember the name of it, but Sissy Spacek was one of the stars.

  6. The criminal system in Germany is totally unfathomable to me. If anything they should increase their prosecution of these scum, not decrease it. Some serious changes in the law needs to be addressed.

  7. This is a very tragic story. It makes me grateful that my daughter got through that period of her life in one piece. There is so much tragedy in the world, perhaps there has always been.

    Don’t know what else to say. I’m still stunned.

  8. I will add one thing. For some years now I’ve been wondering about Merkel’s insanity. Why she keeps welcoming Muslims into her country is simply beyond me. It is obvious to any thinking (ie, equipped with a working brain) person that these people are incompatible with western society. I don’t condemn them for that, but the fact is that they belong in the middle-east which is their (crappy) culture but they built it. When they move to Europe and get benefits, the problems grow ever larger and the ever PC-Europeans (other than Orban and a few like him) can’t understand what’s wrong.

    You just can’t cure Stupid (Merkel, I’m especially talking to you).

      • Please make it public as much as you can !

        There will be translation of the map soon in Spanish, Portuguese and French, too.

        It is only the peak of an iceberg, as most of the cases are silenced.

  9. And we will have no fear when he will walk on same streets where he committed his crimes….. he knows that nodoby will punish him according to his crime…..
    This is what happened when country completely loses its manly junk =(

  10. Dymphna, I am so sorry for your loss. I am left feeling with some kind of perplexing numbness.
    My youngest brother suicided, in a particularly brutal manner, using two very sharp knives, stabbing himself to death. It is hard to imagine doing that. What isn’t so hard to imagine is the damage done to the family and the loss. I don’t think I or my remaining brothers will ever understand such despair.

    • I’m glad you and your brothers have one another. As Shelagh reminded me once, each child is born into a different family. Thus the family your youngest brother was born into was a different one with a different dynamic than was present when you were born. Same family, radically different experiences. When you and your brothers talk about your family, your childhoods, don’t you often have radically different recollections of events?

      Your parents are different people with the arrival of each child, they treat the children differently based on their own families of origin. It becomes more complex with the addition of each child, the spacing of children, the financial or emotional burdens parents face at different points.

      Family moves are hard on kids. Discord, separation or divorce are difficult, sometimes lethally so.

      And then there is school, different for each child as they enter at different years and encounter an entirely different cohort. Bullying, for example, can be endured in silence out of deep shame, but can leave a child vulnerable and less resilient. I never knew my child had been sexually abused by an older, very scary cousin during family get-togethers. Absolutely no clue. And she was warned what could happen to her if she spilled the beans. I didn’t find out until the year before she died what she’d experienced. We think we know our kids, we think we know what goes on. Sometimes we simply don’t.

      My kids experienced a deeply destabilizing move from New England to a “new town” in Maryland. A “planned community” we were forced to move to bec. their father went bankrupt and then took a new job – well-paying – so very far from what the rest of us considered home. Within 18 months, he was gone. Looking back, I’ve wondered if it was because the older children were going into adolescence and his sadistic bullying wouldn’t work any more. Who knows? I have searched my heart for answers and there aren’t any. But the remaining children carry a lot of sadness. My daughter’s counselor said she could trace the patterns back several generations.

      And we won’t even bother with the wrecking ball of substance abuse/addiction. It shatters lives by the millions.

      You and your brothers could probably do the same kind of tracking – i.e., tracing back to find the place at which your brother began to be vulnerable. All I can say from this distance is that whatever he was experiencing, the damage was done long before he picked up those two knives. What he did is symbolically important at some level y’all may understand. Or not. Someone or someones or a series of events or a brain disorder (particularly from the age of 15-23, when the adolescent male brain is at its most disinhibited [see car insurance rates for that age group]) set him on that mortal road. What is obvious from his choice of death is rage. Women don’t really know or experience anger the way a man does.

      You might find this site helpful. I use it often:

      https://acestoohigh.com/

      While I feel a grievous parental sorrow for my dead child, I believe the harm done to her brothers was much greater. Same goes for your grief. I hope you and your brothers can honor him in some way while also expiating your own understandable outrage at him for the mess he left behind for his family to deal with. We don’t have rituals anymore to help us through this valley of the shadow of death. Just when we need them more than ever before, they have disappeared.

      No doubt you’ve had to deal with the platitudes from others who don’t understand but want to sympathize. They’re a whole lot better than the ones who seem so afraid of the contagion they cowardly choose silence. At least the platitudinous are brave enough to say *something*, trying to maintain contact with you…

      May you and your brothers have the courage to be kind to one another as time goes on. You’re all stuck with a separate and unequal labor, i.e., dragging your dead brother through life, the greatest weight falling on the one he was closest to. Can you even maintain family functions/get togethers anymore or did his savage act become a force that sent everyone flying away from one another? The best *you*, Bert, can do is to remain in calm contact with all the others who have to cope with the dead weight. “Being in touch” takes on new meaning for such as you and me.

      You can email me if you like. I’ve gone on too publicly about this as it is. But I refuse to be shamed anymore – a resilience your brother didn’t have time to learn…

      • Thank you, thank you. Your thoughts have given me much solace. My remaining brothers and I are close. We just didn’t realize how ill our youngest brother was and could not have imagined him taking his life. We try to come to terms with it, but it is still so sad. We are by nature quite taciturn, but I know each feels his loss deeply.

  11. Dymphna, and those others here who have dealt with a lot of grief;

    I have been paying attention all throughout this discussion but not had much to say. Sometimes it is just not my turn, and it may not be now.

    I sometimes wonder if grief is the price of wisdom. If so, it may be no surprise that so many will not pay that price, of at least listening, not even when it is to deal with their own. There is certainly plenty of grief to go around, and fewer who will share or cope with it. But there are a lot of good people out there. I have been hearing you and them here.

    If real grief is indeed the price of wisdom, it is no wonder that so few wish to be wise. It is more comfortable to only be clever.

    Not now, but a good future topic on a different matter for maybe you, or maybe Bert, or maybe Moon, maybe anyone, might be of Western Civilisation now being ruled only by the clever. I believe that this is the problem. I am not so certain of the solution, but knowing the problem is a good start.

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