On Rotherham, Recognition, and Responsibility

How to Spot the Signs You’re in the Middle of a Horror Movie

Author’s Note: This is not a fun one, guys. This is written out of a sense of duty since the most recent raising awareness of the “Grooming Gang” scandal in Britain on X by Elon Musk. All due respect to journalists like Julie Bindel who broke the story, Andrew Norfolk who pushed it, Louise Perry whose podcast brought it to my attention, and to those who were actually there on the ground and did something. I’m a bit glum on Britain of late, so it’s good to remember there are still some lions wandering around on the other side of the Pond.

People have a misconception about horrific events. The misconception is that by force of their sheer horror that such events cause a sign to light up somewhere that says: “This is a horrific event! The time to act is right now! Here is the indisputably correct course of action to take! If you don’t do this exact thing, you are an awful person!”

By this thinking, if a horrific event happens then you have the assurance that you will recognize it as horrific right away and know the single most correct action to execute. You’ll never have to bother yourself with thoughts like, “would we even have words like ‘brave’ or ‘heroic’ if it was easy to know and do the right thing?” or “I wonder if I might be an average person, and if I would just kind of sit there and keep going through my daily routine when confronted with atrocity?” Everything, you think, will be clear with clean edges and all the right steps spelled out plainly.

My personal experience has been along the lines that horrific events are more likely to elicit something like “… huh?” from the average person than the immediate recognition of “this is bad” and the subsequent purposeful courage you see in movies.

I’m writing this essay because I think my understanding of the way these things work is more predictive and closer to truth than the ideas most people carry around in their heads. My understanding is also one that allows me to see the pattern as it is happening and break out of the spell. Estimates put the number of victims of the so-called “Grooming Gangs” in Britain at something over six-figures across a period of decades, where Rotherham was but one of many regrettable examples. Hundreds of thousands of little girls tortured, brutalized, and forced into prostitution. While authorities knew about the problem it took years for them to respond. In many cases, the response was inadequate. So, why did this happen?

Let’s start by me telling you the story of a man people found charming.

Everyone called him “uncle Roy” but he wasn’t related to anybody in my family. It was more that he had the habit of making himself like family. He had a way of hanging around without anyone questioning his presence. Always quick with a joke. Always eager to laugh. Bright smiles and easy manners. He’d seize on any tenuous connection and then use it to wiggle his way into some kind of unearned intimacy. His claim to fame was that he’d been a stunt man out in Hollywood, although no one could point to a movie or a television show with his name credited. But by his account, he was on a first name basis with every major celebrity of the era.

I had a good grandma, as I’ve written about before, but my dad’s mom was evil incarnate. It was like she exerted some kind of gravitational attraction toward dysfunction. I won’t talk about the things she did too much in this piece, except to say that my evil grandma made her household something like hell on Earth. So if uncle Roy wanted to spend some of his precious time hanging around her self-made hell to brighten her day, how could that be a bad thing?

You can see the problem here, right?

People don’t willingly choose to hang out around chain-smoking, morbidly obese, physically abusive women with undiagnosed mental illnesses for no reason. That’s like asking someone if they want to be happy or miserable and expecting them to choose misery. Nobody is going to choose that kind of misery for no reason. On the inside, even if their reasoning is flawed and their assumptions are false, people do everything for a reason. In this case, Roy hung around that house because he was a pedophile. He chose to be at that house because he knew it was a safe place to be a pedophile.

Before Roy was done, he had his way with several of us. I was lucky in the sense that he only got me once, but he was after one of my cousins for basically his entire childhood. Roy twisted him all up inside from the time he could barely make a word to just before he graduated high school, so of course he kept the secret.

No one ever did anything about this. Roy was a free man up until he died of old age.

So, why didn’t anyone ever notice the multiple red flags? Why didn’t anyone speak up or act? Why didn’t I ever say anything? I’m writing this piece to explain the errors because I think in microcosm what happened to me was the same thing that happened across the whole of Britain.

My best defense of myself is that this is one of my earliest memories. As best I can remember I was about five. I did as much as I knew to do, but being young it wasn’t very much. I refused to go over to my evil grandmother’s house ever again. When my mom’s friend tried to drop us off there after it happened, I fought like a bobcat. I wrapped myself up in seatbelts and refused to leave the car. When she did pull me out of the car, I ran around and dived back in the other side. I remember my mom’s friend struggling with me, begging me to just obey because she had to go to work in a few minutes. I couldn’t say anything, only sob and hyperventilate, but I wouldn’t let her take me or my little brother in that house. She eventually gave up and took us back to our mom.

When my mom heard about my freakout she was very upset, but not only because I’d thrown a tantrum. Years later, my mom told me the family doctor had mentioned something to her about my cousin having an unusual check-up. While our doctor didn’t know anything and couldn’t be specific, he had to tell her that he suspected something was happening. With this in the back of her head, my mother demanded to know if anything unusual had happened to me. When I couldn’t speak, couldn’t find the words, she demanded to know even louder. I didn’t even have the concepts to explain what had happened. I barely understood it myself.

Young as I was, though, I knew what she wanted me to say to make her feel better. I could read her body language. Children pay very close attention to their mothers. I knew I was supposed to say something. So, I said the thing I knew would make her feel better. I said no. Nothing happened.

She was instantly happy again. I think she gave me some candy. That was it. There was too much going on to dwell on it. If she had any internal crisis about why she had sent me over to that house when that kind of behavior was suspected, she gave no sign. My dad’s job security wasn’t the best. This was during the years of the Spotted Owl crisis and it hit the timber industry hard. There were all kinds of other things to think about.

I’m writing this with a man’s brain reflecting back on a child’s brain. To me now, the connections could not be more obvious but at the time all I had was a tangle of uneasy emotions and memories. Roy spotting me under a bush playing all by myself. Roy grabbing me by my arm and pulling me out from under that bush. Roy dragging me to a side door that led to the basement. It’s not like I even really knew what sex or rape were in any practical sense, so all I had afterward was an ever-present sense of shame and violation. My mother, for all her many flaws, at least took this as a wake up call to never send me over there again.

The years kept going by and I kept not going back over there, which was fine by me. I almost never saw Roy and when I did it was only in passing. Whole developmental epochs went by and I didn’t ever have to think about it at all. Then, one Christmas when I don’t think I could have been more than ten or eleven, which I can only say because my parents divorced not long after, my dad took me over to his mom’s house. Everyone was in the living room. I saw Roy with my cousin sitting on his lap, when my cousin was much too old to be sitting on anyone’s lap. The sight of it staggered me. I wanted to puke, scream, cry, and stab Roy’s eyes out all at the same time. Nobody else seemed to notice the oddity or mind it much. Roy, as ever, seemed to inhabit a blind spot in everyone’s attention.

My evil grandma had just had a stroke, and my dad grabbed me by the shoulder and guided me to talk to her and give her a present. The business of the day was that we were there to see my evil grandma about her stroke and for my dad to work on his complication relationship with her. It wasn’t for a child to disrupt that. So, I did what I was told, and my cousin got off Roy’s lap soon enough. After giving a present to my evil grandma and her cursing at me and my father in Croatian, I felt like I lost the critical moment in which it had been okay to say anything. To say anything after that point would have been to radically change the topic and draw untoward attention to myself.

My brain wasn’t big enough to understand what I was feeling. It had been years since Roy’s assault and what at that age felt like a lifetime. Probably, I told myself, I was making the whole thing up. It made me feel mature to dismiss my own concerns and memories. I had a whole lifetime of my parents telling me that I was wrong about things that were bothering me, although over things much less drastic and dire. It wasn’t like I could remember the assault very well. I didn’t want to go making a fuss over something I could barely remember. There were other obstacles. Wouldn’t everyone wonder why I hadn’t said something earlier? My cousin was older than me, so what if he denied the whole thing? Did I want to be the person spouting this off? His two year advantage over me felt like that made him an adult and that he would surely have said something if it was needed. I wasn’t close with that part of the family so I couldn’t just go and ask him, not only because it would be too awkward but because I never had the opportunity. It wasn’t that I never wanted to do something, it was that I could never figure out how to do anything.

Every time I contemplated how to do something, it seemed like that “how” was full of exploding complexity.

There was too much going on in my life to dwell on it. My parents were divorcing. My mom started to have other kids that I had to look after. I needed to keep doing well in school. I needed to think about college. There were good books to read and those were full of fun and diversion rather than family-shattering secrets. Life goes on. No matter how horrific or tragic or terrible something is, life keeps moving forward. I wasn’t strong enough to swim against that current. There was nothing left to do after Roy died when I was a sophomore in high school. I figured that was the end of worrying over it.

Another seventeen years went by…

I mentioned it offhandedly in therapy after I’d been going long enough to feel okay broaching the topic. I won’t get into the details of why I was going or this essay would get too long, but I’d reached a point I couldn’t keep ignoring my various problems. For the purposes of this essay, we can summarize them as agoraphobia and performing below my potential. I did my best to minimize the memory as something I could be making up but Julie, my therapist, latched on like a pit-bull and wouldn’t drop it. It took a bit of dialogue but she helped me lay it out cleanly. Did I really suppose that I had been dwelling on a false memory since childhood? Wouldn’t I have then had to manufacture not only the original false memory but also all the false memories of every time I recalled it? Roy was dead now, wasn’t he? Wouldn’t I feel better to finally just know? Wouldn’t it be cleaner inside my skull, if I just asked? Wouldn’t my cousin feel better to know he wasn’t alone if it had happened? Either way, I’d have an answer. By then I figured my judgement for these things was pretty terrible and I’d better do as she suggested.

I’d read all kinds of articles on false memory and the Satanic panic by that point. Talked myself up into the assault never having happened, which made me feel like a real champion of reason. As you’ll see this was a sort of reverse false memory, wherein I turned one of my actual memories fake by handling it too much and minimizing it. It was easier to pretend it had never happened. I started my conversation with my dad by talking about all of those things, qualifying almost every other word, and how I was pretty sure what I was going to ask him wasn’t true, but I just needed to know.

“Do you know if Roy was a pedophile?” I blurted.

And I explained to him why I thought that, what I thought I remembered, and what I believe may have happened to my cousin.

It turned out that my cousin had told his mom the whole story after Roy died several years before. And that he wasn’t the only one Roy got after. They’d kept it secret to protect my cousins from the shame.

I had been right! My memory had been true!

I felt sick to my stomach.

I politely asked my dad to hold on for a minute and dry-heaved into the toilet.

I see this now as a bit of luck. I had good external confirmation that I had never been crazy. Some people don’t ever get a clean answer. Some people are just alone in their tragedy, and it sticks with them their whole life.

Red flags were obvious and everywhere in retrospect. The circumspect warning from the family doctor. Roy’s alienation from his own family, which no one ever questioned. The way he’d simply opted to hang around that kind of chaotic environment. The way he’d tell inappropriate jokes, always escalating intimacy, masterfully rattling and manipulating all of the adults to test the limits of their acceptance. My dad always hated his guts, for whatever it’s worth, although it was because he thought Roy was a deadbeat. I do sometimes wonder if he went after me for revenge because of that.

Roy made sure it was easy to pretend all these concerns away. He was an active participant in that process. Don’t kids say and do funny things? Don’t they hurt themselves in odd ways? Hey, let’s keep talking about things that don’t have anything to do with the really weird behavior I’m exhibiting! What about celebrities? Let me tell you about the time I met John Wayne! And hey, don’t you remember all those times we had together? It’s not like I’m a stranger! Do you think I would do something like that?

When people ask questions like, “How can this happen?” it assumes both that people are particularly good at dealing with these kind of situations and that the perpetrator lacks agency. People are terrible at doing anything they don’t do all the time, let alone summoning what is likely to be the most courage they’ve ever had to summon in their entire lives in the moment they are least prepared to summon it, or long after it felt most appropriate to do something. The people who do these things, by and large, also don’t choose targets at random. With the cunning of a wolf, they wait for your weakest moments, your most distracted hours, find the place where you are the least well defended, wait until your life is full and difficult, and then they strike. Of course nobody responds perfectly when that happens.

At no point did someone stand up and do something brave while Roy was alive. Nobody made themselves the irritating, unlikeable, obstacle to Roy getting exactly what he wanted. If they had, they almost certainly would have been seen as the problem instead of Roy. Roy’s victims probably would have been some of his loudest defenders! Perhaps that’s not every household, or even most households, but that doesn’t matter. Roy chose a household in which that would be the case.

Something similar happened, on a national scale, at Rotherham and the other places in Britain where the immigrant¹ rape gangs assaulted young girls. The reports are horrific if you haven’t seen them. I linked to a few of them up above. If you want to do a full anatomy of the failure, to truly understand what happened at the institutions, you have to put yourself in the shoes of every single person in the chain of reporting who failed. Then do the hardest thing and keep imagining until you can see yourself failing, too.

In a movie, a patrolman is only a patrolman and exists in no capacity other than to serve that one particular function. In a movie, the same patrolman is there at the start of the crime and at its conclusion to provide a sense of continuity. In the real world, the patrolman is a guy doing his job and he’s worried about his life, his family, and his career. He also walks into situations that might have been going on for a long, long while before he got there. He was at one point a civilian who learned to do his job from other people already complicit. He’s heard from his superiors that he needs to be racially conscious. Race race race! People with high status are saying delusional and impractical things about race! It’s not sensible “judge everyone by the content of their character” stuff, but total whacky fairy-tale like nonsense that would have you imagine people with different paint jobs are an entirely different species incapable of wrongdoing. They don’t ever quite say that but there’s the scent of fear in the air. Worse, the people saying that crazy stuff are the patrolman’s bosses!

Still, there are lots of people of other races that he likes well enough and he doesn’t want them to have a bad life. The Pakistani man he’s just found with an underage girl does everything possible to ingratiate himself as being part of that normal group. Even the victim doesn’t seem to have a problem with it for the most part, and word on the street is that this kind of thing has been going on for years, so who is he to escalate the situation? What makes this one particular instance so special that he should risk everything to raise it above all the rest, that again, have been going on maybe since he was a child? It’s going to look bad at review time if the patrolman is in the center of some controversy with a racial angle that goes nowhere and a victim who won’t even testify. He’s got a family to feed!

Then that patrolman starts to rationalize things. It’s not like he hasn’t seen other cases where the racial angle doesn’t exist, and where the justice system failed those girls in the same way. Regular people imagine all that kind of stuff away. Surely, he tells himself, he’s not adding to the horror of the world simply because there’s one more similar crime out there that’s being similarly mishandled. He points to big things out of his control like immigration policy. That’s the real trouble, not him refusing to stick his neck out!

It’s not like he can pick and choose immigrants or stop immigration entirely, so it’s just the way the world works. Or so he tells himself. These are all the pains of progress. Or so he tells himself. He’s seen false accusations, too. Or so he tells himself. Maybe the girls are exaggerating? Or so he tells himself.

It’s murkier at the street level. He has to make it murky in his head so that he can protect himself and the people who depend on his paycheck.

Now imagine you’re a social worker and you have a particular set of tools and a girl comes to you with something that you don’t have a process to handle. A really big something that you know would be splashed all over the newspapers. Not only a local problem but a full blown national scandal. Are you going to all of the sudden know the exact right thing to do? Are you, the regular person who wanted a regular job out of the spotlight, going to rise up and be that girl’s champion on the national stage? Or are you maybe going to treat it like it’s something else, because it’s easier? The victim doesn’t seem horrified, so maybe an eleven year old being involved with a twenty year old is more like a seventeen year old dating a twenty year old and there are cultural things going on you don’t understand? Your bosses have said things about… well, not this, but maybe things like this? So you just treat it like a thing you’ve seen before that isn’t as big of a deal because treating it that way requires less of you. You’ve got a career to think about. Your own family to feed. Besides, all the other social workers are doing the same thing when you ask around. Now that you’re doing the same thing as everyone else, nobody can blame you for being uniquely craven. And if you did say something, wouldn’t you be insulting all of your coworkers? Wouldn’t they all hate you for making them look bad? Everyone you know, looking at you with hatred?

Imagine you’re a politician and you have one particular issue and it certainly isn’t mass child rape. Who has an issue like that? You want to do something about healthcare or national defense or trade! Are you going to tarnish your whole career to be the child rape guy? Even if people like you, love what you did to clean up that whole mess, you’re going to be the guy who cleaned up the child rape gangs for the rest of your career. Do you want that association? And isn’t this whole thing a problem with low propensity voters and isn’t there enough dysfunction going on in that community that you can sort of roll your eyes at it and pretend it’s some kind of consent issue? Think of the innocent people who will be tarnished! Most people in that community aren’t doing anything! What about backlash! Yes, that’s it! You’re being high-minded and protecting everyone form a backlash! Look at how virtuous you are, taking on all that sin and suffering for your people!

This is how these things start. Rationalizations chosen over the acknowledgement of unexpected and difficult truths. Easy roads taken, fork by fork, before you ever realize you’re on the path to hell. Then you look up one day, turn back to see all those choices you’ve taken, and it feels too late to turn around even as the flames grow higher. You wish you could turn around, of course. It’s just that there’s no good excuse for why you took the wrong road at the start. It seems like you must need an excuse before you can stop. So, without an excuse, you make the deliberate choice not to see what’s happening until you have to make yourself almost blind to live with whatever you have or haven’t done. None of it feels like you chose that when you set out at the start. I was just a five year old kid who wanted to make his mom happy!

This is the way it always works.

Little lies and big silences. The quiet growing around the horrible thing as the terror of it gets bigger and bigger. Looking away becoming something you have to do on purpose. It’s like a game of hot potato but pretty soon everyone is holding the hot potato. Now you start to think what will people think if they knew how long I’ve been tolerating this? Won’t they know that I’m just as guilty? When it keeps happening it’s not some one-off random thing that happened you can pretend to have misunderstood anymore. You’re complicit, you feel, as much as if you held down the victim yourself. As your understanding of the situation becomes clearer you know that your earlier inaction is less and less excusable. You’re in bed with the monsters and you don’t even know how you got there.

When some of the scandal came to light, I bet some of the people at Rotherham felt relief. It wasn’t so bad! Nobody pointed the finger at the low-level social worker who attended the wedding of one of their fourteen year old wards to an adult man. Which is a thing that happened in one of these cases. Or the cop who told one of the victims to shut up about the whole thing because he didn’t want it looking bad on the department. Which is a thing that happened multiple times in these cases. Or at the judge who gave light sentences for political convenience. Yet another thing that happened. I can imagine all of them thinking, with insistence, “Hey! There wasn’t anyone who came along and told me to do something better! There wasn’t some kind of sign that came on and told me that this wrong and what to do about it!”

Dear Reader, you may mistake from the tone of this article that I have some kind of bottomless compassion for the people who allowed these crimes to occur. You may think that clear sight and understanding about why people fail in these circumstances implies an immediate, unlimited, and unqualified forgiveness. Either for others or for myself.

I am not saying that at all.

Mercy is hard. It’s just that you have to see clearly before you can truly give it.

I wrote this piece in this way so that you’d understand, if only for a moment, what it is to be coward and more, so that you’d understand the terrible cost of cowardice. I wanted to momentarily give you the sinking feeling that the people in these institutions must have felt when they began to realize the totality of their failure. What I imagine is the same feeling I felt. I wanted to give you that feeling, so you’d recognize if you ever felt it again.

The compassion I feel for people is on a holistic level. I have come too far and learned too much to pretend that people are machines, meant to follow a preset course without their active participation or judgement, or that courage is not a basic requirement for a good life in a good world. There is no life worth living that will not demand a hard thing from you. Anything else someone tells you is a demon’s whisper whether the person who told it to you understands that or not.

I will absolutely not tolerate cowardice in anyone for a moment. Not because I am cruel enough to demand bravery but because it is cruel to let someone wallow their whole lives in fear. It costs too much to live that way and I have too much loyalty to the person everyone can be when they choose to do the right thing.

Every part of me wishes I’d ruined my mother’s happiness when I was five and she asked me if anything unusual had happened. Even if I didn’t have the words, I wish I had struggled to stay silent. I wish I’d had the courage to endure her unhappiness. Or that I’d run across that Christmas party at eleven and lunged at Roy’s throat. I see this with eyes unclouded now. It would have been the tipping over of the first in a line of dominos. I would have brought the unspeakable ugly thing into the light where it couldn’t be ignored. Why did you do that? What’s going on? People would have been forced to ask questions and be honest about their suspicions. I might have created a disruption bigger than Roy’s manipulations and I might have saved my cousin the fullness of his tortures. I might have shattered the illusions Roy had built around himself. At least, I should have done something if only so that I could know for myself that I tried. I have spent the majority of my life wishing I could go back and change things.

Now that you’ve read this piece, I hereby charge with the duty to be brave. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you suspect something horrible is happening, or is still happening, then you have to immediately forgive yourself for not knowing what to do or to have done right away. Odds are, this is going to be true for almost anyone in this situation. You are going to have repeatedly failed before it ever occurred to you to behave correctly and you’re not going to have a convenient excuse for yourself to answer the question, “Why now?” That’s the bitterest pill to swallow. You have to be honest about the fact that you failed and just get over it. You can’t go back, you can only take the best option available to you at that moment.

If it seems like you should have done something a while ago, that people will never forgive you for not having done it, I repeat, just get over it and do it now. I don’t care if it has been years or even decades. The person doing the bad thing is counting on you to keep feeling this way. There’s never going to be some magical time where it feels like it’s okay to do something. You have to choose to do it right now

If it seems like you’re not the most appropriate person to respond, just get over that too and confront the situation because it is never the job of any single person. The abuser probably chose the environment they’re in because of unclear lines of responsibility. If you know about it, then you are the right person. You’ve been manipulated and that feeling of “who am I to do anything?” was part of the manipulation.

Don’t have definitive proof? Stop equivocating! There is knowing and then there is knowing. You, a single person, are not the entire legal system. Your duty is to act on reasonable suspicion. If you see something that raises the hairs on your neck then act on it! You have the absolute right to act on your gut. Intrude into the situation! Demand additional information! Disrupt whatever is going on! The courts will decide if your suspicions bear up. The cops can come gather evidence. But now that you’ve read this piece I completely free you from the obligation to eat shit and smile like it’s ice cream because you don’t want to upset anyone without acting out a television police procedural on your own.

Don’t let these thoughts inhibit your actions for a moment! If you do, if you let yourself think about it too long, you’ll freeze up again. You’ll get caught up in the trap of circular thoughts the abuser has created to protect himself. This is the first unusual thing required to be brave. You have to get over your failures and break out of the trap.

Then, you need to do something. It will probably be stupid. Get over that, too. This is what bravery looks like in real life. You won’t ever do the exact right thing right away. Odds are, if you were fully equipped to behave perfectly the abuser would never have come into your orbit. My only rule for this is don’t do anything that seems likely to get yourself killed or to kill anyone else, but don’t be afraid to be jarring or to do something that feels wildly inappropriate and impropitious. Call someone a motherfucker in a place where you’re definitely not supposed to call someone a motherfucker. Call the pedophile a pedophile in front of other people who might also suspect them of being a pedophile. Say wild crazy shit loudly so other people know and watch the ice start to melt. The point of this is to help break yourself out of the pattern, to make unthinkable thoughts thinkable, like that you have a right to defend yourself and others from harm. Real wild thoughts like that your life matters just as much as anyone else’s.

If you’re quite certain something bad is happening, and if there’s a horrific situation that you think is actively going on, as in the crime is happening right now, or worse to you, then you have every permission to use whatever force is required to end that situation. Please try to call the police first but if you can’t don’t let it stop you. If you need to hear it, it is always morally okay to use physical force to defend a child from imminent danger. Even animals know there is no law higher than that one. There are no words people could ever write down on a piece of paper that would make that not be the highest moral imperative. It’s okay to defend anyone. It’s okay to defend yourself. Don’t let anyone even whisper anything to the contrary. Don’t pretend I didn’t say imminent or that you don’t understand the degrees involved. When a grown man is luring a small child into his car, he has already initiated violence.

For the love of everything holy, don’t ever let yourself get caught in the trap that the abuser is the only person who gets to initiate action or that you have to be a passive bystander to your own misery.

One of the most helpful things for me was when I went to group therapy for people who were sexually abused as children. Whatever lingering doubts I had about myself and my memories vanished when I went into that room. It was like I could see my own strange mannerisms, little things about myself I had never questioned, copied and pasted into other people. The way everyone looked at the floor instead of at each other. The way all of us had to sit with our chairs facing one way so that we could see the door. The unnatural distance we placed between the chairs. We all had different stories but it was also one story. It was all one thing.

I changed after that.

I couldn’t let things just sit anymore.

If there was a problem, I had to address it right away.

If there was bad news, I forced myself to deliver it without delay.

My life got dramatically better after I started behaving that way.

When my cousin dies, it will probably say on his death certificate that he died of diabetes. Nobody will ask why it was that a middle-aged man didn’t care about himself enough to manage his insulin levels. Nobody will ask why he was so reckless to let himself go blind despite every opportunity to change course. People might blame the medical system or say it’s a shame it couldn’t be cured, but I’ll know what really killed him.

It was a thing that slunk into the safest, most delicate and holy part of his heart, and strangled the very notion that he deserved anything decent, good, or kind in his life.

And I won’t ever allow anything like that to happen again.

1. Calling them by a different name just feels dishonest. Almost all of those involved were from Pakistan or Afghanistan.