Cam, Cam, Everywhere a Cam

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Where Are All the Men In This Town?

© David Hartman

     I'm not a movie or T.V. critic. I'm not trained that way, and I simply don't watch enough of either to keep up with the latest shows.
     I'm a writer, and I know good writing when I read it or see it. That's why I'm such a big fan of the old drama series Homicide: Life on the Street.
     The episode "Every Mother's Son" from season three and written by Eugene Lee, is one of my favorite episodes in the series primarily for two segments of the show. A clip of one of those segments is cued for you above. The video quality isn't the greatest, and you'll have to scroll down again and turn off the dinner music so the audio from the video clip doesn't play over the music.
     In the clip are two scenes of two mothers -- Patrice Sayers and Mary Nawls -- interacting quite by accident in the "fishbowl" of the homicide unit of the Baltimore City Police Department. Between those scenes is a cut to the ongoing interrogation of 14-year-old Ronnie Sayers, who shot and killed Mary Nawls' son, Darryl. That scene isn't important to this post, but I was too lazy to edit it out and merge the bookend scenes together. That I don't know how to do that also is a factor in you getting the bonus scene.
     Mary Nawls finds herself at the homicide unit to talk to detectives about her son's murder, and is sent to the fishbowl to wait for the detective to see her. Patrice Sayers wanders into the fishbowl after Darryl has detectives escort her from his interrogation. At 14, he's a man now, and anxious to prove he doesn't need his mommy anymore.
     It's only by accident that a victim's mother and a suspect's mother would be allowed to be together in that situation, but the power of the story is that to this point, neither Mary or Patrice know the connection they share. Soon enough they will, and how they come to terms with that is the driving story of the episode.
     In the meantime, they're just two grieving mothers who form a bond as they wait and wonder where it all went wrong.
     "Where are all the men these days? That's what I want to know."
     That's Patrice's question, and it's one I thought about Sunday in church as I read the snippet in the bulletin about all the upcoming women's programs at area churches. There's like a half a dozen of them in Oklahoma City in the next few weeks.
     I've got nothing against women's church programs and such. I just don't think they're needed nearly as badly in our churches and families and communities today as programs and seminars to teach men how to be men. Husbands how to be husbands, and fathers how to be fathers.
     As a group, women seem to have it much more together than men today. And men not having it together is the main reason why our society has become such a mess.
     I'm one of those people who believe that most of the moral and social problems we face today can be traced directly to the breakdown of the traditional family. I'm not gonna spew statistics, but the numbers are there if you want to look for them.
     Over the past several decades, unplanned, out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy has steadily increased. It's to  the point now where we're overrun with unplanned children born to parents either unwilling or unable to care for them. No one ever heard of anorexia or bulimia 50 years ago. Gang activity, drug abuse, suicide -- all way up. I don't think it's a coincidence that also on the rise during that time has been the divorce rate and the number of households that only have one parent from the get-go.
     But don't be fooled into thinking that the increase in divorce and single parenting is the only cause of the breakdown of the traditional family. The number of two-parent dysfunctional households also is alarming. And it's probably more disturbing, because the intentions that precede the dysfunction often are noble and good.
     Parents want to provide a better standard of living for their kids. Nothing wrong with that. So mom goes off to work, and kids go to daycare or come home from school to teenage babysitters or empty homes with televisions until one of the parents gets home from work.
     Parents want their kids to be smart. They want them to be successful and well adjusted and social. What parent wouldn't want that? To jumpstart that process, at an earlier and earlier age there's soccer and baseball and basketball and band and scouts and tutoring and youth groups and dance and clubs and cheerleading and volunteering and piano lessons -- all of it good stuff, mind you. Unless there's so much of it that Johnny's never home. Without balance, Johnny grows up to be smart and popular and successful and he marries Jane who is equally smart and popular and successful. And they make babies without the slightest clue how to parent them because neither one of them spent enough time at home as kids to learn how the whole parenting thing is supposed to be done.
     Even in stable, two-parent homes, kids can't model what they're not home to see.
     I know it sounds hokey and old-fashioned. I know Hollywood doesn't make things easier by glamorizing violence and sex and general moral decay. But if the downward spiral is going to stop, it's going to stop at home.
     And men are going to have to rise to that challenge. No more running from babies and families.
     We're going to need dads who take their kids to church, then bring them home to God's other house.
     We're going to need more men who teach their sons how to treat and respect women by showing them how dad treats mom. We need more fathers to teach daughters that real love has nothing to do with shapes and sizes and that your best gifts are never worth trading for the cheap imitations that pass for love today. We need more dads with the gumption to teach that right is right, wrong is wrong, and shades of gray are a myth. We're going to need dads willing to set limits and teach kids that that life isn't all about you by living lives that aren't all about themselves.
     Superheroes that fight the evil in this world. We could use some real X-Men in this town. 

When Punishment Doesn't Fit the Crime, It's Probably a Lethal Injection

© David Hartman

     Jimmie Ray Slaughter was the babydaddy.

     But Jimmie didn't want to have to pay child support for his mistake, and when Melody Sue Wuertz -- the child's mother -- threatened to sue for child support, Slaughter visited Melody and baby Jessica Rae at their Edmond, Oklahoma residence.

     He shot Melody in the neck to incapacitate her. It was a trick he'd learned in the military. It would keep her alive and conscious, so she could watch. And know. Then he went to baby Jessica, just days short of her first birthday, and shot his daughter in the back of her head -- execution style -- while her paralyzed mother watched.

     Having dispensed of the main problem, he returned to Melody, still very much alive, and filleted her like a fish, cutting her open from the neck all the way down until finally she bled to death on the floor.

     Katherine Ann Busch was born with some mental challenges, and when the seven-year-old rode her bicycle past the Yukon, Oklahoma apartment where she and her mother used to live, the girl got off her bike and knocked on the door. Floyd Medlock was alone inside the apartment watching cartoons at the time.

     Medlock invited the girl inside the apartment and fed her some macaroni and cheese. Then he "snapped," he later told police. Or at least one of his personalities did. So Floyd choked Katherine, stabbed her in the back of the neck with a steak knife, and held her head underwater in the toilet until she was dead. Then he stripped her, raped her corpse and tossed it in a nearby dumpster.

     Michael Long had a love jones for single mother co-worker Sheryl Graber. She wasn't interested in him. Not that way. After several attempts to talk Graber into bed, Long decided to give her one more chance.

     So he went to the apartment where Graber lived with her five-year-old son, Andrew. When she refused to put out on her last chance, Long took a knife from his coat and stabbed Sheryl more than 30 times in the doorway of the apartment. Trying to help his mother, Andrew got between her and Long. He too was stabbed to death in what former Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson called the bloodiest crime scene he'd ever visited.

     For their crimes, Jimmie Ray Slaughter, Floyd Medlock and Michael Long were executed by the State of Oklahoma using lethal injection.

     I watched all three die. Their deaths were so quick and sterile that frankly, I have a hard time even remembering details, especially of Medlock and Long. Slaughter's execution was several years later, so it's a bit fresher in my mind.

     Before you witness an execution, either as a family member, an attorney or a reporter, prison officials tell you that people will handle the experience differently. Some will have nightmares or flashbacks that might even require counseling later. I never had either.

     One day I'll completely forget what Slaughter looked like strapped to the gurney in the death chamber, too. But in preparing to cover his execution, I reviewed the entire court file from his criminal trial, including dozens of crime scene photos. So far I haven't found a way to forget the photo of Melody Wuertz lying naked and bloody -- and very dead -- on her living room floor not far from her dead little girl.

     Given that background, maybe you can understand why I'm confused and sadly amused at the latest fuss over how inmates are executed by lethal injections.

     The first of the three drugs in the cocktail of death traditionally has been sodium thiopental, which puts the condemned to sleep painlessly before the drugs that paralyze the voluntary muscles and stop the heart are administered to complete the execution process.

     But sodium thiopental is only produced by one company, and that pharmaceutical company plans to stop making the drug, which now is in short supply.

     So states like Texas -- where executions are as common as days that end in "y" -- now have to find a new drug to put inmates to sleep. The drug of new choice seems to be pentobarbital, which I'm told is the drug used by vets to put down dogs and cats.

     Inmates already are suing over the new drug, questioning the process of how it was selected to replace sodium thiopental and whether it produces as painless a death as the old drug.

     This blog post isn't pro or anti death penalty. My own views on the issue tend to waffle, based largely on the testament I'm reading from at the time.

     I just find it odd that inmates are being allowed to get their state-issued knickers in a knot over which drug we use to kill them. Maybe they'd prefer a Louisville Slugger to the noggin instead.

     I wonder if Katherine Busch would have quibbled over going to sleep with sodium thiopental versus pentobarbital for her own death as opposed to say, being stabbed in the neck and drowned in toilet water? Would Melody Wuertz have preferred lethal injection to being shot in the neck and incised chin to pelvis?

     Sometimes it seems we just don't get it. Since when does the criminal get to choose his punishment? 

     As a society, we have to come to grips with why we execute killers. Is it to serve justice and act as a deterrent, or is it simply vengeance for the sake of vengeance?
     If we're going to claim the death penalty is a deterrent, then make it a deterrent. Don't make it sterile. And televise every execution. Make it mandatory viewing for every high schooler in America. Let them see that regardless of what Hollywood and their violent video games portray, human life really does matter. It's not a game. I'm not sure that's a message we send with the current method.

     Regardless, we don't need these frivolous lawsuits bogging down the legal system for other cases that actually are important. We don't need the tax bill of having to defend against them.

     If pentobarbital is good enough to kill a dog, it's good enough for Jimmie Ray Slaughter.