Melodrama

It is a tragedy that a young (local) man was killed in a knife fight last weekend. He, at age 18, was defending his 17-year-old girlfriend's honor with an alleged friend who had a grudge against the girlfriend's family, with whom he had previously resided. There had already been an altercation earlier in the evening, but the participants had returned to their respective residences. At 3:40 am, when most of us are sleeping, the victim and his girlfriend "took out the trash" and saw the alleged murderer just watching them. The tension escalated into a second fight between the two, with the victim handing over his knife to the girlfriend because he "didn't want to do anything stupid." The assailant, however, kept his knife and although the girlfriend asserts that her boyfriend flattened the guy in the fight, the knife found its way into the fight.

[The girlfriend] sat behind her boyfriend, trying to use her own body to stanch (sic) the bleeding on his back and holding his shirt against gaping wounds on his chest and abdomen.

“It was bleeding so much,” she said.

She called for an ambulance and tried to keep [the victim] still.

She remembers he told her, “If I die, I love you.”

“I said, ‘Don’t say that, you’re not going to die.'”

But [the victim's] eyes rolled back into his head.

“I cried, ‘David, David.’ I grabbed his face. He looked at me for a second and then his eyes rolled back in his head.”

The ambulance rushed the victim to the hospital, lights flashing and sirens blaring, in a valiant attempt to save his life; alas, he died in transit.

This is a scene from a TV soap opera, right? Actually, it's excerpts from the newspaper article published about the event in a local newspaper. That's right: this is what passes for journalism. It's not about reporting the 5 W's, but it is all about publishing the details of the he said/she said of every story, from the most trivial to the most important, sensationalizing a senseless murder to boost circulation.

Turning a tragedy into a soap opera benefits no one, but certainly reveals how callous we have become about broadcasting other people's business to further our own.

The newspaper took advantage of the 17-year-old girlfriend, a child who probably just wants the victim's life to be important and remembered. She doesn't realize that providing that kind of intimacy to the media may very well adversely affect the trial of the man accused of committing the crime, an assailant who swears he didn't stab his "friend." At the scene, while detectives interviewed witnesses, she said, [the assailant] continued to proclaim his innocence. “He said, ‘Tasha, you know me better than that.’”

She doesn't realize the implications of the event, much less her account of it, because she's a child who should have been home with her family, not in another state with her boyfriend, who carries a knife and believes that violence teaches respect. This is a tragedy, one of the many that occur daily in our neighborhoods, an event that deserves dignity, not melodramatic publicity in the local press.

The end of the article, however, is the saddest to me: During a telephone interview Monday afternoon, [the girlfriend] said she is still trying to understand the loss of “such a perfect boyfriend and a good guy.”

“Why do all the good people have to go?” she asked. “My mom said the good people have to die to go to heaven and watch over the rest of us.”