Deadly October

Common denominators of this column are two vacations taken two years apart and two deaths, each of which were of major global impact. Although years apart, both were murders that happened in the month of October.

In the fall of 2006, while my sister Sue and brother-in-law Mike were vacationing in Florida, I joined them at his family’s getaway home in a well-maintained retirement community of manufactured homes in Bradenton.

I found myself trudging along the sidewalks at the Centre Shops of Longboat Key as Sue looked for bargains, with Mike dutifully in tow, while I lagged outside on park benches people-watching. I had no business with merchants whose wares went above my financial comfort zone of Wal-Mart, or even upscale merchandise at Penney’s.

One store that caught my interest was a craft shop that sold original creations of art rather than mass-market productions. Still, not much tempted me to pull out the plastic until I came upon, of all things imaginable, a rock.

Now, I already had a small collection of rocks. A well-rounded specimen of basalt rock, smooth from the pounding waves along the shore of Lake Superior. The white granite rock pilfered from Yosemite National Forest is a favored possession. A lava rock from the Hawaiian island of Kauai is most unique. (The one taken from the Big Island was shipped back when, after four months of really, really bad luck, I realized the curse that is said to befall anyone who takes a lava rock off the island of Hawaii was indeed true.)

So, before leaving Long Boat Key, a 60-pound, 60-dollar rock engraved with the word “Image” was purchased on October 7, one day prior to the murder of John Lennon on October 8, 1980, and two days shy of his 40th birthday, October 9. Perhaps a coincidence but, nonetheless, this faithful admirer cherishes the chiseled piece of stone that pays tribute to the genius of a man who brought momentous change in music.

A year ago this month, I was vacationing in Rapid City, South Dakota. After a most glorious week of unseasonably warm 80-degree temperatures, with day after day and hours upon hours spent experiencing nearly every possible natural wonder of the region – Mt. Rushmore; Jewel Cave; Needles Highway in Custer State Park with free-roaming buffalo, donkeys, prairie dogs and other native creatures; Mammoth Site; Sylvan Lake; waterfalls accented by the colorful fall leaves – I paid a modest forty dollars for a good chunk of petrified log, pound per pound a much better deal than souvenir T-shirts.

One of my last jaunts was at the base of Devil’s Tower just across the border into Wyoming. It was October 10, a day of a seemingly timeless walking around the base of another natural wonder of time’s making among acres of skyward-reaching pine trees.

These awesome sights brought to me visions of a terribly awful act of torture that began during the early morning hours of October 7, 1998, when a victim of a hate crime was left in a coma from fractures to the back of the head and in front of the right ear. Repeatedly pistol-whipped by Aaron McKinney, and witnessed by, but supposedly not involved in the actual beating, Russell Henderson and he each received two life sentences for the murder of 21-year old Matthew Sheppard, a gay student in Laramie, Wyoming.

During the trial, the girlfriends of McKinney and Henderson both testified that the two had planned to rob a gay man in advance. At the Fireside Lounge on the University of Wyoming campus, Sheppard proved to be an easy target as he was easily convinced the two were sympathetic to gay rights and offered him a ride home.

Instead, he was robbed of his wallet containing $20, plus his shoes, and left to die tied to a wooden split-rail fence, bleeding in near freezing temperatures. A cyclist happened by 18 hours later and the horrors of the previous night were soon exposed to the world. Matthew Shepard passed away on October 12, 1998.

For nearly a decade, attempts have been made to bring into law The Matthew Shepard Act to “Expand the law to authorize the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute certain bias-motivated crimes based on the victim's actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability. Current law only includes race, color, religion or national origin.”

On October 8, 2009, the House of Representatives passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act by a vote of 281-146. It’s now up to the Senate to vote before the legislation becomes the law.

No, there’s no funereal stone that commemorates the hate crime of that cold night in October eleven yours ago, but chiseled in my mind are scenes that “I can’t imagine”.