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Blackstone House of Horrors: The Story Doesn’t Add Up

There’s a pretty awful story unfolding here in Massachusetts, about four children living in filth and neglect at a home in Blackstone. It reads like a horror movie: The house was infested with vermin, 2-foot stacks of dirty diapers were everywhere and feces covered the walls. The two youngest kids showed signs of neglect. Police found the remains of three infants and a number of dead animals in the house.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/rUfYNQsr3h8

The mom, 31-year-old Erika Murray, came off to neighbors as a dedicated mom, and her Facebook page paints the picture of a happy family. While the two younger children were severely neglected, the two older lived seemingly normal lives — going to school, playing with friends, smiling in pictures on the front porch. The Facebook page — taken down over the weekend — showed pictures of home-cooked meals.

Murray’s lawyer says the woman is mentally ill, trapped in a world of cold fear. The man she lives with apparently wanted no more than the first two kids, so she claimed she was babysitting the other two.

Authorities were first tipped off that something was wrong when a neighbor went to the house and saw the horror. The four kids were removed from the house on August 28, but the infant remains were only discovered a few days ago.

Predictably, people are rushing to judgement. The comments sections of the various news reports are full of anger toward the mother. I feel that anger, too, so I’m not criticizing the commentators.

At the same time, this story doesn’t add up on so many levels. For example, we know almost nothing about the man of the house, who lived there the whole time. It’s inconceivable that he lived there blissfully unaware of the filth around him.

Also, Murray’s parents have been described as doting grandparents to the two older children and didn’t know about the two younger kids. They apparently never went in the house. It seems impossible to me that they had absolutely no idea about what went on in the house and that they never saw anything about their daughter that was off.

Pardon the expression, but everything about this story stinks. The truth of it all will eventually come out.

My hope going forward is that Murray gets help. She needs to pay a price for subjecting her children to the terrible conditions. But if she’s mentally ill and can be treated, she should be given that treatment and given a chance to be rehabilitated.

Most importantly, I hope the kids are well taken care of from here on forward. I pray that the youngest children get the best medical care available.

Erika Murray's Blackstone, Mass., home

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A (Small) Defense of Shepard Smith

A lot of people are incensed with Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who suggested Robin Williams was a coward for killing himself this week.

My first instinct was to call him out for being an idiot, an enabler of insensitive motormouths uninterested in learning about how depression really ticks. But I’m going to take the road less expected.

I’m going to defend the guy a little bit.

Mood music:

First, let me clarify three things:

  • I hate  Fox News. It’s not a political thing. I hate CNN and MSNBC, too. These networks are more interested in infotainment than enlightenment. Most of the anchors say poorly thought-out things on a daily basis, and no one bats an eye.
  • I’m a fierce advocate for breaking the stigma and misunderstandings around depression. I’ve lived through it. I’ve watched friends die from it. If you think suicide is cowardly, you have absolutely no idea how the depressed mind works. It doesn’t make you an asshole. It just makes you uninformed. Unless you do know how the depressed mind works and you still think it’s a cowardly move. Then you’re an asshole.
  • I consider Robin Williams a hero. It saddens me that depression got the better of him, but his acting roles have done more to enhance understanding of the human condition than myriad research studies that have been done over the years. Tragic? Yes. Cowardly? No.

That said, Smith was stupid to call Williams a coward. But I don’t think he meant it that way in his heart. I watched a playback and read the transcript, and I think he fell into the trap many TV personalities fall into when speaking off the cuff. A lousy word choice dropped from his lips. If he weren’t live on air and had had the time to consider his words, I doubt coward is the word he would have chosen.

His actual words:

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? You could love three little things [Williams’ children] so much, watch them grow, and they’re in their mid-20s and they’re inspiring you and exciting you and they fill you up with a kind of joy you can never have known. Yet something inside you is so horrible, or you’re such a coward, or whatever the reason that you decide have you to end it. Robin Williams, at 63, did that today.

I’ve seen Smith’s work over the years, and while I think he has a tendency to be overly dramatic and excitable, I also think he’s one of the more balanced anchors on a network that is anything but “fair and balanced.” I also noticed the pain in his eyes when reporting Williams’ death. I think the pain was genuine, that he was honestly distressed by the end of such a bright star.

Now that I’ve said all that, maybe Shep will bring some real depression sufferers and survivors onto his show so they can educate us — and him — on what this shit is really about.

screen shot of Fox News anchor Shepard Smith

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Curse You, 403: Forbidden Error!

UPDATE: We believe we have fixed the setting issues behind the problem. But if you encounter an error message, please let us know. Thanks!

For months, my OCD has been triggered by a vexing, mysterious problem: Some of my readers keep getting “403: Forbidden” errors when trying to read posts. I’ve looked high and low for the cause and solution, to no avail.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/QD0D7IuriWQ

What probably infuriates me most is that I can access the posts just fine. If it failed for me, too, at least there’d be a little less mystery.

Instead, I’m left to wonder why the blog opens for some people and not others. I have noticed that the folks who get 403 messages are trying to open posts from an iPhone or iPad and usually get through from their desktop computers.

Also read “Depressed Web Servers and Other Amusing 404 Pages“

But there are some who get locked out from any mobile device, and some who can get through on those Apple devices.

Typically, my OCD is triggered by things I can’t control. In this case, however, it’s something that probably can be controlled. It’s pinpointing the issue that’s the problem.

In response, I’ve done what any typical OCD head would do: wasting hours and days exploring every line of code and every URL for clues.

I’ll continue to investigate the problem. If anyone wants to do some investigating of their own, I’ll gladly accept the help.

If there’s any silver lining, it’s that the error messages are killing me much more than they are killing you.

Storm Trooper 403 Error Message

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Respectful Disagreement about the Valley Patriot

In recent months, I’ve taken the editor of one of my local newspapers to task over what I’ve seen as his overeagerness to make judgement calls.

I unfollowed Tom Duggan on Facebook at one point because I was so pissed off. Duggan and I have since had a conversation, and I want to make sure everyone understands this: I stand by my earlier criticisms. But it was in no way meant as a personal attack. In fact, I have much respect for Duggan and believe he gets it right most of the time.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:2itgUw0RkrEcqmMxtBzDM7]

Let’s go back a bit in time for some context.

Duggan reached out to me after I wrote this post on the case of Erin Cox, a North Andover High senior who was punished for being at a drinking party police busted up a few weeks ago. I argued that Duggan rushed to judgement when he published an article saying Cox appeared in court on drinking charges, which turned out to be untrue.

A few months before that, I blasted him for what I saw as his overeagerness in reporting the death toll of the Boston Marathon bombings. As is usually the case in the madness of collecting breaking news, Duggan received information on the death toll that turned out to be inflated. He corrected his information as it came in. But I felt — and still do — that he was in too much of a hurry to get the news first and that he should have waited for better confirmation before blasting details all over Facebook.

In both stories, Duggan believes I took him out of context, that I unfairly painted him as a rogue editor making things up and inflating details for the hell of it. He said he had no problem with criticism as long as it was fair and not based on spliced-together bits designed to paint him in an untrue light.

So let’s clarify some things:

This isn’t about splicing details together in a manner that fits the point I want to make. It’s about my reaction to his work as it unfolded on social media.

Duggan has done a lot of good around these parts. I worked at the Eagle-Tribune for nearly five years and know that the paper was in need of real competition. I was happy to see the Valley Patriot emerge as a check on my former employer. I actually think it made the Eagle-Tribune a better paper.

Duggan has a lot of heart and a passion to get it right. My problem in recent months wasn’t that he spread lies. He didn’t. It was that he got too excitable in the face of breaking news and rushed out information that needed more verification.

As someone who has been on the receiving end of criticism many times in my career, I know it’s no fun. But I have to call it as I see it.

But understand this: When I criticize Duggan, I do so with respect for all he’s done for the community.

Hat with Press tag

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The Jokes About Aaron Hernandez Are Sad

Update April 15, 2015: Hernandez has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

A lot of jokes are making the rounds after the arrest of former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez on first-degree murder charges. It’s human nature to do this sort of thing. But it’s also sad.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/1e3m_T-NMOs

One of the more popular jokes had to do with Hernandez switching from tight end to wide receiver, a reference to prison rape.

This is how we can get when the mighty fall. In Hernandez’s case, we have a football star making millions of dollars, living in a mansion and seemingly having life by the balls, only to piss it away by allegedly murdering someone. Hernandez is charged with first-degree murder and faces five firearms charges. According to prosecutors, he drove his friend, 27-year-old Odin Lloyd, to an industrial park in the middle of the night and orchestrated Lloyd’s murder. Hernandez was said to be enraged after a fight at a nightclub three nights earlier.

If he did indeed murder his friend, Hernandez should suffer the consequences, possibly by spending the rest of his life in prison. That’s as it should be. But there’s a lot about this case we don’t have the details on, and we seem to forget that in America, we are innocent until proven guilty.

Life is hard and we all stumble through it, no matter how successful we are. So when someone who has achieved greater success than the rest of us goes down in flames, we tend to find comfort in it.

What we often forget is that we’re all constantly inches away from that one bad decision that can lead us to ruin. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in life and paid for them all, though it has almost always involved me hurting myself. Some of us abuse and kill ourselves. Others kill someone else.

Of course, it takes a special kind of bad to snuff out someone else’s life, and when that person is atop the world as Hernandez, the shock and disappointment are sharper. No one likes to see their heroes fall. So the harsh judgments come, wrapped in bad jokes.

It’s a shame that we get this way.

I won’t lie: I’ve made the jokes when the mighty have fallen. I’ve laughed at a lot of them when made by others. When Paris Hilton faced jail time a few years ago, a lot of similar prison jokes were made and I chuckled at them.

But more recently, I’ve tried to be better than that. Maybe that makes me a little more self-righteous about the Hernandez jokes than I should be. But there it is.

Ultimately, my hope is simply that those hurt by this case — friends and family of Hernandez and Lloyd — will get the help and support they need in what must be an exceedingly difficult time.

Aaron Hernandez