Whodunnit? - Alcyonenews

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Posted June 19, 2020

Whodunnit?

We are mourning. The pain is intense, but we are locked in. It is hard to take it but there is no escape. There is “prevention” but now it is too late for that.

This is not a singular occurrence and we should deem this moment being “the time before the next one”. We should act on it, for while we cannot exclude recurrence, we can shrink the odds. Moreover, doing something about it may lessen the pain.

We lament the “result” of the event. But we must also lament the occurrence as well. Society lay bleeding and needs healing. We must get to the bottom of this.

As I see it we suffer three crimes: The first was the making into a killer a man who was not born to be that. The other two crimes were sequential to that. Going to the root of it all could be arduous but the price of inaction is too high to gamble. And we must strike while the iron is hot because a “later” may vanish as the time goes by.

It is easy to blame he who pulled the trigger, tag it with a plausible story and relax listening to Doris Day chanting “whatever will be, will be”. Being passive does not protect the mouse from the cat. Let’s do what we must, peruse the whole picture, identify bad “Waldos” to avoid in the future.

I never met Jennifer, John’s wife of 18 years. I doubt nothing about her bright persona shown us by the media. But I knew John.

I met John while he was in the claws of the Islands Trust and I was regularly attending Trust meetings. Once they got him, they never let go of John. Harassing John was a theme of Trust conduct for over a decade and this not many can survive intact.

John had turned his youthful love for cars into a business “parting out” and otherwise dealing with cars, on his property which was under the high tension powerline traversing the island. This is land better left to industrial use, but the Trust was of another mind and clashed with John. People spoke of the Trust’s treatment of John as “killing by a thousand cuts”. I saw and heard John several times pleading with the Trust to let him operate his business so as to “to feed his family”. The Trust would not. This way they drove him to buy the Ganges hill property, which was suitably zoned. He moved his business there, but the Trust tailgated him.

I do not know the magnitude of the financial consequences the Trust caused John. Former Trustee George Grams set the cost of the Trust driving the SSI Coffee company off the island at $350,000. The two are not identical, but the figure manifests how costly and stressful dealing with the Trust can be.

John’s battle with “city hall” was intense and long. His persistence exemplified Anatole France’s assertion that “there is nothing parents would not do to feed their young”.

There was goodness in John and nothing speaks to it louder than the “1,000" letters of support islanders wrote the Trust for the March 21, 2013 LTC discussion of John’s rezoning application. The size of that mailbag and the number of people swarming the meeting hall to support John verbally, was spectacular. The Trust reaction was to defer the matter to April 11 ... This expression of support gauges the community’s feelings for John.

In researching this story, on June 13, 2020, I went to the Trust Website for another look at the “1,000 letters”. But they were gone; a “Server Error” and a patch of gibberish had displaced the 1,000 letter pack ...

“Record manipulation” and “evidence obliteration” are second nature to Trust. On May 2, 2013, the Trust used the same tactic to eliminate incriminating evidence, again. The probability of this happening “by chance” is abysmally low – the opposite, that the Trust acted to block evidence incriminating to itself, is a virtual certainty. This “evidence theft” manifest the Trust’s awareness of its implication in this tragic event.

These realities are pertinent to my objective which is to cause the investigation of the Trust complicity in the tragic event we discuss.

I also checked on line the “effects of work environment”. Here is what I got:

“About 1,480,000,000 results (0.51 seconds) – Featured snippet from the web: For too many workers today, unhealthy work environments are prevalent. Employees are far more likely to experience a slew of mental and physical health problems including stress, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, hypertension and many other negative outcomes than come home feeling energized and happy.”

When it is a “government” (the Trust in this instance), who messes up a citizens “workplace”, things are the worse for that.

Would these lives had been lost without the Trust “breaking” this man? That is the question. We are entitled to the answer.