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Grace So Amazing: “God, how could You? Why would You let this happen to us? How could You let Shari suffer? Oh, God, how much she must have suffered! Did You even listen to my constant prayers all this time? Didn’t You hear anything I said?”
As long as individual men and women have the power and agency to exercise free will and choice, evil will continue to exist, and it must be challenged and fought.
“God does not do what has been done here. It is because of the confusion and the sin and depravity of man that we’ve come to an occasion like this.”
Ridgeway cited the tragedy that had befallen the Welsh coal-mining village of Aberfan in 1966 when spring rains saturated and unsettled a large slag heap and sent it sliding 700 yards down a mountain, engulfing a school in mud, sludge, and rubble, killing 116 children and 28 adults. The reverend described how one American reporter looked on the devastation and said, “I cannot believe in God after seeing this.” A Welsh farmer searching for his own son said, “Friend, the God I know is here weeping with us. Don’t ever forget one day He lost His child too.”
It has been my experience that when someone says they’re not jerking you around, they’re jerking you around. When they claim they’re not playing games, it means they’re playing games. And highly intelligent people don’t often feel the need to go around telling anyone how intelligent they are.
With this UNSUB, who had already killed at least once, just as he was conflicted between a sense of personal grandiosity and deep-seated inadequacy, he also would be conflicted between feeling the growing pressure he was under and glorying in his anonymous celebrity and power over the entire community, together with his specific power to manipulate the grieving Smith family. The longer and more times he gets away with a violent crime, the more he will refine his M.O., and the more confident he will feel about the next time. This makes him even more dangerous.
“You know, the injury heals but the scar doesn’t ever go away.”
it is difficult to rehabilitate someone who has not been habilitated in the first place.
Anytime an offender preys on a victim, he creates a “relationship” between the two of them; a relationship the victim does not seek or want, but a relationship, nonetheless. Therefore, I believe the aggrieved party has a definite stake in how that relationship is resolved. The judge is there to make sure the effect of the impact statement is not overweighted, but victims should have rights in court just as defendants do.
