Hoping for Justice

Fair Warning Time: This post probably won't be very funny. I know, I post once a darn month, and now I'm going to try and get all serious? At least the title sounds kind of comic bookish, right?

Anyway, as a lot of you who see me or talk to me on a regular basis know, back in February, a high-school classmate of mine, Lindsay Graygo, was murdered in her apartment. It was a really tough thing to hear, being that in HS, this girl lived right up the street from me. Further, I pretty much grew up with this person, as we attended elementary, middle, and HS together. We played soccer together as kids. We weren't especially close, but we had a number of close mutual friends, enough that I was truly troubled by the circumstances surrounding her death. I wasn't anything resembling her best friend, but I knew her well enough to know that she was truly a happy, caring, good person. And, this stuff shouldn't happen to good people. Even more, when you grow up in a relatively upper middle class community like the one we did in Erie, you don't think of this kind of thing happening, even as we've spread out to all corners of the country over the past 10 years.

What made it all the more troubling was that b/c she had only lived in Michigan for a little over a year, she wasn't very close with a lot of people, making it hard for the police to draw any conclusions about probable suspects. As recently as a week ago, it seemed like this was going to end up being one of those unsolved crimes. The police certainly hadn't released much information publicly about their investigation into the crime. It made sense, really, as this isn't a necessarily high profile case, no matter how much the Erie and McDowell High School community, along with her friends from her State College days, and her brief time in Michigan care about the outcome.

Then, yesterday, I was checking my email, and whatnot, and I realized I hadn't checked lately to see if there had been more news, and I went and looked. Talk about timing: They made an arrest yesterday in the case. Of course, it might not mean much, but they do have a DNA match, and the guy did live in the same complex, and moved out shortly after the crime was committed.

Of course, after all of this, we still need to hope that the police have the right person (which seems likely after a DNA match). After that, we have to hope that there aren't any mistakes made in the investigation, and that this all leads to a conviction for the crimes he is currently charged with, not some garbage plea bargain deal.

Then, we have to live with the fact that no jail sentence is going to undo what's been done. I can only hope that it helps bring a sense of closure to those who's lives have been impacted by this senseless crime.