They found a 23-year-old WSU graduate out on Albion road (between Pullman and Colfax, Washington)? She was bleeding and unconscious. Her injuries led authorities to believe that she fell out of a car or that she was hit by a car.
This is disturbing for multiple reasons:
1. It's mid-week. It's not like a weekend when a young girl might go out and whoop it up into the early morning hours.
2. It's in the boonies. I know that some WSU faculty, employees, and students live there and commute the 15 or so minutes into Pullman, but it's still relatively remote and small town.
3. It's not so far from where I housesat for 5 months last January through July.
She's in Spokane and still in bad shape--still unconscious.
Is it weird that I want her to wake up so that she can solve the mystery? I've done a lot of thinking about that sort of stuff lately. Victims and bad guys alike so rarely get a chance to speak after something awful happens. For instance, I'm glad the gunman at the Texas Fort Whatever survived and did not kill himself or wasn't gunned down. That so rarely happens. I would like to hear him explain his actions.
And the same is true with female victims of violence. It would be nice if this girl could recover and solve her own crime, thus putting away the person/people who did this.
Yesterday was creepy news day:
1) the WSU girl was discovered bloody and unconscious
2) a WSU frat boy fell out of a window and seriously injured his back (although that's almost expected these days--so much so that it seems prudent to design/rebuild fraternities so they are single-level with bubble wrap lawns and trampolines for further cushioning...)
3) a 77-year-old man hit a bridge on the Snake River while boating and died (and there's a creepy follow-up article in the Tribune this a.m. that ends with reassuring readers that no damage was done to the bridge...I bet that makes the family feel great...)
4) This is my fault: I caved and watched the interview Oprah did yesterday with the woman whose face was ripped off by a chimp...While I should have been disturbed by the face behind the veil, I was more disturbed to witness the usually cool, calm, and collected Oprah so totally uncomfortable. Case in point: at the end of the interview, she wanted to sort of shake hands with the woman, but the woman not longer has fingers (only one thumb on one stump), so Oprah sort of grasped one of her stumps and the woman's one thumb sort of went over Oprah's hand. Oprah laughed nervously and called attention to the thumb. The woman said something to the effect of, "It's a little piece of me." Yee...
Even more disturbing is the letter Oprah read from the owner of the chimp who did all the damage. The last sentence of the letter wished the woman a "fully and speedy recovery." Isn't that the most insane and insensitive thing to say? Of course this woman will never recover fully. She has no eyes. She has a mouth big enough to fit a drinking straw through. She has one finger. Her scalp is still open. Her nose is a big chunk of thigh skin they grafted onto her face. I don't think she will fully or speedily recover. Even if she becomes eligible for a face transplant someday, will she ever recovery emotionally? Will her daughter?
It's time to face the facts...chimps shouldn't be pets.
ReplyDeleteThe story of the girl found on Albion Road really bothered me too, still does actually. What gets to me the most is that she was left to die. Some one who I pass in the grocery store, or am in line with at the bank, or fills up next to me at the fuel station, or heck, maybe even sat next to us the last time we ate at a restaurant, left this girl in a pool of her own blood to die. I am so glad every time I hear a news report that she's improving. Just like you, I hope when she wakes up she can solve this mystery, for herself and for all of us.
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