Joe

Joe was my mother's grandfather. That is, Joe was my mother's mother's father. Joe was murdered by his mistress Ella in Indianapolis in the summer of 1904, seven years before my mother was born.

While my mother didn't know Joe, I assume she knew something about him. She lived the first few years of her life with her mother and Joe's widow, Ida -- my mother's grandmother-- and some of Ida's sisters (all widow-women themselves) in a big rattle-trap farm house on the east edge of Indianapolis. The farmhouse burned down in 1914, or maybe 1913, and though my mother was only three or maybe younger when the house burned down, the image of the fire was seared in her memory for the rest of her life. A firehouse was built on the site in 1915. The family moved to a newer, nicer house next door.

How much my mother knew about her grandfather I don't know. She never mentioned him to me. But then he had been long dead by the time my mother was born, shot in the mouth by his mistress Ella during a drunken lunch at Ella's house which she shared with her husband Frank. The house was not far from the Marmon plant where both Frank and Joe worked as machinists.

What I know about Joe and his murder comes from newspaper reports -- the murder and Ella's trial were covered extensively by the Indianapolis papers. Ida staged a big funeral for Joe, with a procession to the cemetery passing by Ida's big ol' rattle trap farm house where the family were gathered on the porch in mourning clothes. According to the papers, it was quite a spectacle. The Nordyke Marmon company paid for the funeral.

According to the papers, Ella's trial was quite the spectacle too. Ida attended every day along with her widowed sisters and Frank, Ella's husband, as well as friends of both the deceased and his murderer.

Ella was convicted and sent to prison, but she was released to an insane asylum some six months later, and I have found no further mention of her. Nor have I found any more mention of her husband, Frank.

Ella claimed she acted in self defense when she shot Joe. She said she was merely his laundress, not his mistress, and he had threatened her and knocked her down, so she got her gun from the chest of drawers in her bedroom and shot him dead. Unfortunately for Ella, there were witnesses, neighbors who'd come over for lunch and beer with Joe and Ella (Frank had gone back to work at the plant) and they saw what happened.

According to the witnesses, Ella's and Joe's relationship was well known and had been going on for at least two years. Frank knew about it and he seemed to approve. However, Joe used a different name in his dealings with Frank and Ella. As if he were living a double life. How much Ida and her children knew about Joe's other life is impossible for me to know now. As far as anyone connected with Ella and Frank knew then, Joe lived with and took care of his invalid mother. His marriage to Ida and the children he had with her (daughter Edna -- my mother's mother -- and son Ralph, my mother's uncle) were apparently not known to Ella's friends. When Joe's invalid mother moved to Chicago to stay with her daughter, Joe attempted to sell her house and things to help support her -- and no doubt himself as well.

Joe had plans. What they were was never made clear, but his plans did not include Ella. At the fateful drunken lunch in the summer of 1904, Joe told Ella that he was done with her, and he wouldn't be seeing her any more. According to witnesses, Ella said that if she couldn't have him, no one could, and she got her gun and shot him. A doctor was called for and then the police. Joe's injuries were too severe -- one account said he died instantly -- and the police took Ella away to jail.

During World War 1, Ralph moved to Chicago with his mother Ida, but Ida moved back to Indianapolis within a few years. Ida lived in Indianapolis with one or another of her widowed sisters, one of whom remarried, until she died in 1935. For his part, Ralph married a prostitute in Chicago. Unfortunately, she was promptly confined to an insane asylum herself. Ralph didn't divorce her and didn't remarry. He stayed in Chicago working on lakeshore tugboats for the rest of his life.

Edna, my mother's mother, married in 1910, and my mother was born the following year in November. As it happened, a half-brother Edna and my mother knew nothing about was born in March of 1911. They had the same father. Different mothers.

My mother's father was arrested for a burglary he insisted he did not commit in May of 1912, and by the end of 1913 he no longer lived in Indianapolis. He'd joined his older brother in St. Louis. In 1914 he married the young daughter of German immigrants in St. Louis, and within a few months, she gave birth to a daughter, Helen. My mother's mother had sued him for divorce in August of 1912, not long after his arrest, but I don't know if the divorce was ever granted.

When my mother's father was killed in a rail yard incident in St. Louis in December of 1916, my mother and her mother attended the funeral (which my mother remembered being in Indianapolis, but it wasn't. It was in St. Louis.) My mother also remembered the Big Scandal at the funeral of her father: the discovery that he had another wife and daughter, making him a bigamist. Yes, her father had another wife and daughter in St. Louis. And his first wife also lived in St. Louis, married to his older brother. There were three children from his first marriage. The daughter had been taken in by another brother, and two sons were coming into adulthood at his parents' house. My mother's mother was his second wife (legally). The half-brother my mother knew nothing about was born to a high school girl in an unwed mother's home.

At least some of the menfolk in my mother's ancestry were... busy.

[I've written several other versions of this story, and I'll probably keep trying until I get it right!]

Pondering the Dead Lists

As I'm old and ill myself, thoughts of mortality naturally enter into my consciousness -- perhaps more than I want them to. Death of course is part of the pageant of life, and I can't say I'm particularly frightened of shuffling off this mortal coil when the time comes, whenever that may be. For all my current health problems, I'm doing pretty well. Frustrations there are aplenty, but it could be so much worse, and so I'm grateful for whatever time I have left and whatever joy and insight I can find and share in that time.

In exploring my ancestry, I'm finding out about people and incidents of death and let's call it mayhem that I knew little or nothing about unmotil recently.

It started with my uncle Vincent who was tried (twice) for the murder of his wife in 1946. My father was one of his defense attorneys, so I knew something about it but not a whole lot. The main take away was that he was acquitted, but how that happened seemed a bit mysterious to me. What I gathered was that my brother -- who was there when his aunt died -- was interviewed in chambers, and subsequently, the court directed a verdict of acquittal. But I didn't know that this was his second trial, and that the first trial had ended in a hung jury -- 9-3, acquital. I also had no idea what the situation really was in Vincent's household and how his wife might have met her demise by cruel accident just as Vincent claimed in his defense.

His alibi was that he was at his mistress's house when his wife fell down the stairs, hit her head and expired. He found her body when he returned the next morning. Called the police, one thing led to another, and he was arrested and charged with murder 2.

One theory was that an intruder had come into the house -- for robbery perhaps -- and bludgeoned her to death. The other theory was that she had just fallen to her death down a flight of stairs, hit her head on a table and that was that.

The prosecution argued that in a drunken rage, Vincent had pushed her down the stairs and left her to die while he went to dally with his mistress in town.

That was actually what my mother believed to be the case, and there was always that kernel of doubt about what had happened.

But my brother was a witness, the only witness, really. He could not testify because he was ruled incompetent.He was 11 years old at the time and severely physically and mentally disabled. He had been raised by his aunt and uncle, Vincent and Garla, since his mother died at his birth. My father could not look after him and Vincent and Garla could not have children of their own, so they took my brother in and raised him as their son.

The extent of his disabilities were manifested over years. He couldn't stand up or walk on his own, he couldn't talk until he was about eight years old, he had repeated seizures. He was in much worse shape than I thought. I only saw him when I was an infant. He was in private care after Garla's death and it was thought unwise for me to see him or him to see me later on. So I never did.

As a witness, I'm not sure what he might have said, or if what he said in chambers made any sense. But apparently it was enough, combined with other evidence, for the judge to declare there wasn't a case for murder.

I learned from a cousin I discovered online that Garla had many problems herself. She drank heavily for one thing. But maybe worse, and what could easily have been the proximate cause of her death, was that she couldn't see very well. From her descriptions of what was happening, her vision would come and go -- she could see for a time, and then her central vision would go blank and she could only see peripherally, sometimes not even that. It can't be corrected with glasses, of course. If she was tipsy and lost her vision the night of her death, well... that would be that, wouldn't it?

Vincent claimed he had left the house in the afternoon to go see Pauline his mistress, and he stayed with her until the next morning. She corroborated his alibi in court. The prosecution's claim was that Vincent had dispatched his wife so he could marry Pauline. They both denied it vigorously.

Well, as it turned out, after his acquittal, Vincent and Pauline were married and they moved to Santa Barbara where they lived the rest of their lives. Hm. Stranger things. I didn't know they were in Santa Barbara -- I thought they'd stayed in Iowa. I periodically lived in Santa Maria, just up the road from Santa Barbara. Stranger things indeed. Vincent died in 1962 which was the last year I saw my father. I think there is a connection, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

Next on the dead list was my mother's biological father Lawrence. He died when she was five years old in 1916. She told me she remembered very little (I think nothing) about him, but that she clearly recalled attending his funeral where it was discovered he had another wife and daughter. Ooops. This supposedly led to a big scandal, and eventually my mother and her mother moved to California from Indianapolis "to escape the shame."

The shame? Yes. According to my mother, the "discovery" of Lawrence's other family at his funeral was scandalous because it meant that he was a bigamist.

But as I've explored the situation and the public record, I'm not sure it was such a scandal at all. Nor am I convinced that Lawrence's death was an accident.

According to the story I was told and my mother seemed to believe, Lawrence was killed in a streetcar accident in Indianapolis when he was crushed between the cars.

Except that's not quite what happened. He wasn't in Indianapolis, he was in St. Louis. It wasn't a street car accident, it was a railyard incident, and he was indeed caught between two rail cars, a freight car and a refrigerator car, and he was cut in half.

Yes, he had another wife and daughter in St. Louis, but whether he was a bigamist, I can't say. There are hints that he was never legally married to my mother's mother [Note: I found a marriage notice today (01/10/2017); Lawrence and Edna were married on February 4, 1910 in Louisville, KY, yet in April 1910, Lawrence was listed in the census as divorced] but I've found a record of his marriage to his St. Louis wife and to another wife in Indianapolis from whom he was divorced. He had another child by a young girl in Indianapolis (she was 16) the same year my mother was born, as well three children by his first wife, and another daughter by his St. Louis wife. There may have been others, who knows?

The point is that he was quite a ladies' man, and this is one reason why I'm suspicious of his death in the railyard.

For his St. Louis wife subsequently married the yard boss. How... convenient.

Railyard incidents leading to the death of switchmen weren't all that rare in those days as worker safety was not the highest priority, but it was certainly possible to arrange "accidents" should the need arise.

It may have arisen in Lawrence's case simply because... well, any number of reasons. At any rate, he died, and soon thereafter my mother and her mother and Leo, a friend of Larry's from his Indianapolis days who married my mother's mother, decamped for California and a new life. Things went well for them. And then they didn't. But that's another story.

Most recently -- yesterday in fact -- I came across the story of what happened to my mother's grandfather Joseph. He died in 1904, well before my mother's birth. His wife, Ida, then put on her widow's weeds (she always wore black said my mother) and... well, "mourned" is probably too grand a term. More accurately, she declared her independence, and she lived with her children and her widowed sisters and their children until the household broke up in 1917 with the departure of my mother's family to California. Ida went to Chicago with her son, Ralph. Ida's sisters, Nora and Lillian (or Josephine, her first name which she didn't use) stayed in Indianapolis. Ida would return to Indianapolis after Ralph got married c. 1920, an she lived there (as a widow) with one or another of her sisters (both of whom remarried) until her death in 1935.

Joseph, Ida's husband and Edna's father (Edna was my mother's mother) was shot and killed by his mistress Ella on May 24, 1904, apparently after he told her he was "through with her."

According to news reports, he'd been seeing Ella for years, and he basically hadn't lived in the same household as Ida and their children for years before that. Supposedly he moved out to take care of his ill and disabled mother across town. But then at some point, he sent his mother to Chicago to be looked after by his sister who lived there, and Joseph stayed at his mother's house while he prepared to close it. At least that was his story. He had taken up with Ella Hicks, a married woman, at sometime during his separation from Ida.

Ella claimed she only did Joseph's washing and when he made an indecent proposal to her that day, she defended herself with her revolver, thus the murder was actually self defense, don't you see? But apparently there were witnesses to actually happened, and who knew all about Ella's affair with Joseph. Though Frank, Ella's husband, was not a witness to the murder, he apparently knew about the affair, and...I guess he was OK with it. He and Joseph were apparently buddies at any rate. Since I derive all of this from newspaper reports of the incident and Ella's trial, I can't say how much of it is true. Make no mistake, media was just as filled with falsehoods and "fake news" then as it is now, if not more so.

Witnesses said that Ella was intoxicated and was quite deliberate in shooting Joseph when he told her they were done. She was not about to let him go back to his wife or to another woman, no way, no how, and she shot him.

The jury believed that account of what happened and convicted her. She was sentenced to life in prison, but her lawyers argued for a new trial. Apparently that happened, but I don't know the outcome. They were going to try to argue an insanity defense, and maybe they were successful, but if so, I doubt Ella would have been released.

And so... I don't know what these things mean, if anything, in the vast, eternal scheme.  Yet I'm bothered by it just the same.

I didn't know. I think that's the most bothersome thing. But I don't know what I would have done if I did know about these deaths and others among my ancestors and relations. As I find that misadventure plays a role perhaps as great as illness and old age in the history of deaths in the family, and that affairs play more than a little role in those misadventures, I have to think about how that all works -- especially in the contexts of the times.

We have an image of Victorian/Edwardian propriety, let's say, that simply isn't matched by fact. In doing research, I found out my father was married three times. I knew about two of his wives, but not the first one -- she was never mentioned. I knew he had affairs, but with whom or when, nope. Well, except for one, but I'll leave that for another time.

And so it goes. In discussing some of these things with my new-found cousin, she confesses there's so much she never knew about her own family and ancestors, so much that was never said. She didn't know about me, for example, nor did I know about her, even though we lived fairly close to one another in California, and there were other cousins (all now dead) much closer -- and we knew nothing about one another. No one ever said. She said there were other cousins too that she had no knowledge of, except their names.

She said she thinks I was privileged because at least I got to know some of the family in Iowa. She never did. We both wonder if there are any relations still living in Iowa, or did they all move to California?

We don't know.

She wants to know how as many of our relatives as we can find died, for she thinks there might be a genetic thread to follow. I don't know.

For example, we share a German great-grandfather who died in 1901 a couple of weeks after my father's birth. We don't know the cause, but we do have a picture, a family portrait taken perhaps five years or sooner before his death (there's no date, but the clothes and the ages of the children indicate it was taken in the 1890s). Reinhold, our great-grandfather, appears to have fallen asleep in the portrait while reading the newspaper. I look at it and suspect he had congestive heart failure -- which would be consistent with what we see in the portrait. May be. I don't know.

She wants to know how Vincent died. I don't know for sure, but I suspect alcoholism, as he was a heavy drinker like his late wife. My father died of cancer. My mother died of emphysema -- smoked like a chimney till the end, she did.

But my sister died of pulmonary thrombosis following surgery for shattered knees injured in a prison takedown. I think I've told the story before. She was 59. My brother also died of pulmonary thrombosis, but it appears he was in a coma for a long time beforehand. He was 32.

So many things we know, and so many more things we don't know. It is a wonder...

Hm. Things You Find Out On the Internet

For some time, I've been working on a follow up post to the one about the house where my mother grew up in Santa Maria. In order to work on it, I had to do some more research on where she and her mother, grandmother and aunts lived in Indianapolis.

The household in Indianapolis was a matriarchy because all the older women were widows, and my mother's mother (Grandmother Ida's daughter) would become a widow soon enough.

So today I was looking up some information on Ida's husband Joseph (I think I called him John in an earlier post) who died in 1904. (I may have said 1902. It seems I confused Ida's husband with her father.)

I found his death certificate today. It said the cause of death was "gun shot wound." That was interesting. I had thought he died in an accident of some kind, but had no idea he'd been shot. Maybe it was suicide? Murder? Something else?

Digging around on the Google Machine, I found news stories which explained plenty. He was murdered.

By his paramour, Ella Hicks.

Apparently, he'd been seeing Mrs. Hicks -- yes, she was married -- for some years, and one day, while he and she were drunk at her house, he told her he was through with her. She took her gun from the chest of drawers in her bedroom and shot him in the mouth, killing him instantly.

I had no idea. Well, I had some suspicion that something was up because Joseph had been living with his mother -- so he said -- at her house, which he used for his official address much more than the address of the house he shared with Ida and their children, Ralph and Edna (Edna would be my grandmother.)

Ella was tried in July of 1904 -- the murder was in May and apparently was witnessed by more than one neighbor -- and she was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Turns out Ida's sister Lillian was the widow of an Indianapolis policeman who was killed in the line of duty. Now I'll have to find out about Ida's sister Nora, who was also a widow. What happened to her husband? And then there is the saga of Edna's husband Larry, who would die under curious circumstances himself -- I've always thought he was murdered by "accident," but how would such a thing be proven? Ah, that's the cleverness of it, no?

This is Insane. This MUST Stop NOW...

I've been very frustrated with the lack of progress in reducing or ending police violence and killing in this country. Indeed, the rate of police homicide has gone up, not down, since the advent of nationwide protest actions against it after the execution of James Boyd by police snipers in Albuquerque in March of 2015.

Police killed more civilians in 2015 than they did in 2014 and there seems to be no focused effort on curbing the killing.

Protest has not accomplished that goal -- if it even is a goal anymore.

Recently the San Diego DA released video of a police killing that happened there in April. It's yet another shocking indication of police mis-interpreting far too many individuals and actions as threats that MUST be met with lethal force, which in almost every case is defended by their departments and DAs as somehow necessary to the protection and well being of cities and society.

NO! These killings create chaos and destruction, they ruin lives, families and communities. They are doing just the opposite of what so many defenses of police killing and violence claim. They are insane. They MUST STOP.

This defense of the police killing of Fridoon Nehad in San Diego makes no sense at all.



The officer who killed him had no knowledge of the "threat" except that provided by the dispatcher based on erroneous information relayed to 911 by a clerk at a bookstore who thought he saw the victim brandishing a knife. The victim was not armed. He DID NOT HAVE A KNIFE. Even if he had been armed with a knife, HE WAS NOT THREATENING ANYONE,  and even if he had been, doing so IS NOT A DEATH PENALTY OFFENSE.

Repeat: Brandishing and even threatening with a knife IS NOT A DEATH PENALTY OFFENSE.

Furthermore, police are not intended to be judge, jury and executioner whenever they feel afraid.

The officer in this case was so frightened by the mere presence of this man who he believed was the suspect in an ERRONEOUS 911 call and dispatch that he shot him essentially on sight.

This has happened HUNDREDS of times so far this year. And it must STOP.

STOP THE KILLING. STOP THE KILLING NOW.

Happy Holidays...

Incidents in Albuquerque

Not sure where this is going to lead, but I have a feeling it's not going to end well.

There was a road rage incident a little while ago. A four year old girl was killed by a gun-wielding driver who believed he was disrespected by another driver on the interstate. They got into it, apparently, and the girl was shot. This incident made national news -- yet another example of the Wild-West, Albuquerque style.

 Not long afterwards, I think it was the next day, an APD officer who was engaged in a "routine traffic stop" was shot by the suspect and a week later he died of his wounds.

In both incidents suspects were quickly apprehended and now await trial for murder most foul.

Both the media and the police department have gone into full-meltdown mode over these incidents, the media practically demanding that "the gloves come off" and a return to the practices of the past be authorized. You know, shoot first and never face consequences. Those practices that got APD into a consent decree with the DoJ.

Shoot and shoot again and keep on shooting.

The local media has been in hysterics over the deaths of the little girl and the police officer. They've been whipping up hysteria among the public, too. It's shameful. Disgusting. And apparently out of control.

The police department and the police union, for the most part, has been relatively sane about it all -- at least compared to the media. And they seem to be doing their part to engage in public diplomacy. It's interesting to see the contrast. Yet the end point seems to be to get back to the way things used to be.

Kill, kill and kill some more.

The police department claims that violent crime in Albuquerque went up 14% in 2014, but whether it's true or not, who knows? Police have a tendency to lie in pursuit of their objectives, and statistics used by police are constantly being massaged to "prove" whatever police believe needs proving. The public has few resources with which to compare and contrast police perspectives on crime or anything else.

We have witnessed a steep decline in police killing of civilians in Albuquerque, a decline that really hasn't been highlighted by media or anyone else (partly because it is masked by killings by other law enforcement agencies) but I can easily imagine that it will be cited as a primary cause of the supposed increase in violent crime since (say) the consent decree was agreed to last fall.

There is some sign of a community peace movement, however, one that may be able to counter the violence by police and some members of the public.

I'm always an optimist, but sometimes I wonder if my optimism is really justified.

DIGNITY, JUSTICE, COMMUNITY, PEACE

They Made Him Do It

Neighbors

There are problems with this summer's story of Dylann Roof (apparently pronounced "Rauff") and his killing spree at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, and yet there's a tremendous amount of symbolism involved in it, too.

Of course it's yet another incidence of mass murder by a white male American, one of hundreds over the years. Another day, another massacre. It's American as apple-pie, and according to opinion leaders, there is nothing that can be done about it. Too bad, so sad. Next?

"This is a violent country" -- supposedly -- and "this is a violent culture." Well, yes, true enough. But to then claim that "nothing can be done" about it is just silly. To claim that because elected leaders won't do anything about it, and courts essentially make things worse that therefore nothing can be done is crazy.

I pointed out in another venue that some of the commentary surrounding this mass murder in Charleston recognized that Dylann Storm Roof had for all intents and purposes been granted permission to kill Negroes by systems of impunity for murder of black folks, operating ever single day in this country, and generally involving police committing acts of summary execution -- such as the killing of Walter Scott in North Charleston only a few weeks ago.

Officer Slager is accused of murder in the case of Mr. Scott, and he is apparently being held in the cell next to Roof. 

I must qualify a lot of my comments in this post with the term "apparently" because -- apparently -- a lot of the "information" being spread by the media is false. The spreading of false information by media would ordinarily be considered propaganda, but this is a summer news cycle, and during the summer news cycle, false narratives are routinely produced and spread regarding pretty much any topic, false fears are generated (sharks, missing white women), false tales are spun. It's the way the "news" business is organized and operated. Just as the major mass media tends to take the weekends off and produce little or no "news" on Saturdays and Sundays, so the media uses the summer for a vacation from seriousness... It's been this way for generations, and there is little sign of breaking with this tradition.

Thus we need to maintain skepticism in the face of whatever is being said or shown about this mass murder or any other story that is featured in the major mass media over the summer (or really at any other time, but that's another issue.) False information and false narratives are all but guaranteed.

What we can point to with some degree of certainty is that while Negroes continue to be gunned down by police with almost complete impunity, every now and then someone is caught and/or held to answer for doing so, and two of them are being held right now in the North Charleston, SC, jail.

We can also point to the fact that white men who kill Negroes are treated with respect, courtesy and dignity. They are protected by the System. Negroes, on the other hand, are mostly treated like disposable or surplus... animals. They are not simply shot on sight -- though that happens with some regularity -- they are warehoused in vast numbers in America's astonishingly cruel, brutal and exploitative prison-industrial system. They are the meat which feeds the system of injustice in this country. White men who kill Negroes simply don't face the kinds of consequences Negroes face for being alive in this country.

In this case, Dylann Roof was apprehended while armed in North Carolina some 14 hours after he shot and killed nine parishoners at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. He was reported to have been apprehended "peacefully," though he was reported to be armed. He was taken into custody and provided with a bulletproof vest for his perp-walk on his way to being flown back to Charleston, some 220 miles from his apprehension point.

This sequence was staged for the cameras, and what was so striking about it to me was that Roof was being protected throughout. There was no violence in his treatment at all. A black man in similar circumstances would have been treated roughly -- if, that is, he wasn't shot on sight. That's simply the way "justice" works in the USA. And hardly anyone would consider it unusual.

The message is clear: law enforcement exists to protect the white folks and to suppress the Other.

That's its primary function. When we see such stark examples of it, many people don't even notice.

One aspect of the mass murder that has been extensively reported (though who knows whether it's true?) is that Roof apparently told his victims: "I have to do this. You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

In other words, "You Negroes are making me do this..."

This is a historical claim that has been used for centuries to justify oppression and lynching and all sorts of depredations of Africans and African Americans, the quinessence of victim blaming. The Negro doesn't have to actually do anything to be accused of forcing the white man to act against Negroes who rape white women and would take over the country if they could -- if they weren't being killed and suppressed by heroic police and white vigilance.

They made him do it...

Isn't that always the case though? Whether the excuse is "reaching for his waistband" or being reported to be armed or any number of other supposed "threats," the Negro is always to blame for making the white man kill...Always. Of course it isn't just Negroes who are subjected to summary execution by police and white vigilantes, but they are the most likely to be subjected to it. The fear they inspire in some segment of the armed and vigilant white population is fundamental to very their existence. Without their fear of what the Negro would do if they weren't being summarily killed and routinely suppressed, some of these white folks would have no reason for living...

Police are the primary actors in this drama, but when policing fails (as it did in Charleston when Michael Slager was arrested for the on-camera killing of Walter Scott) it's incumbent on white vigilantes to step in and take care of what needs to be done, right?

One of the stories being circulated is that Roof researched the history of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston (a founder, for example, was Denmark Vesey who planned a huge slave revolt in 1822; the pastor was Clementa Pickney, a state senator who was responsible for a number of laws restricting police action and making them accountable for their actions...) and he targeted the church on the anniversary of the intended slave revolt and just before Juneteenth, a celebration of the end of slavery. Supposedly, Roof knew quite well what he was doing, where he was acting and why, and he likely intended to induce... panic at the least. According to some reports, he wanted to trigger a civil war or a race war.

Was it because Michael Slager had failed?

I have no way of knowing, but the coincidences are there.

I sensed there was "something in the air" that would make this summer a serious and quite possibly tragic one. I didn't know exactly what it would be, but this mass murder seems to me to be an opening salvo, not the climax, far from it. The summer has only just begun.

Despair is hard to vanquish under the circumstances.

And the killing goes on and on...

[Adding: A history of Charleston's 1822 slave uprising worth pondering in light of current events:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/charleston_shooting_the_attack_on_the_ame_church_is_rooted_in_the_city_s.html ]