A Common Problem With A Tragic Result

The daughter and granddaughter of a dear family friend were murdered in their home on Friday. The narrative of the evidence provided by police is all too familiar. Maybe we can cure our culture so this doesn't happen, or maybe that is for all practical purposes impossible and we need a better way for our society and legal system to respond to clear warning signs.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Jesus Cartagena Jr., 20, has turned himself in to an El Paso police station in connection to the murder of Shanta Hanish, 19, and her mom, Laura Hanish, 58. 

According to the criminal complaint, Cartagena said he had "done something bad in Albuquerque."... 

Police said they believe Cartagena – Shanta's ex-boyfriend – stabbed her and her mother to death. She had broken up with Cartagena about two weeks before she was killed.

Cartagena and Shanta had lived together for about a year before the break-up. She had just moved back in with her mom.

The mother and daughter had been found dead Friday morning at their home in southeast Albuquerque.

According the complaint, her friends and family told police that Cartagena wouldn't leave Shanta alone. 

He had been following her to work and calling her dozens of times. They also said he had been in and out of the hospital after making suicidal threats.

Cartagena is now facing charges for two open counts of murder. Albuquerque police are traveling to El Paso to meet with detectives. 

From here. More details here and here.

Laura was a long time employee of the public defender's office. Shanta was head lifeguard at a local recreation center and an education student at the University of New Mexico.

Cancer Takes Leading Mathematician At Age 40

Maryam Mirzakhani, the world's first female Fields Medal winner and Persia's first winner of that award, died of breast cancer at an American hospital [on July 15, 2017].     . . .  

Her medal was mostly for her work on the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces, especially for her 2007 proof of a formula for volumes of the moduli spaces (previously conjectured by Witten, Kontsevich, guys of this caliber are normal in that field). However, she has done lots of related mathematical work that was usually focusing on the modular group, moduli spaces, and geodesics – which were sometimes shown to be ergodic, sometimes very regular and not chaotic, and similar issues were relevant.

- An obituary post from an acquaintance of her and her Czech husband who survives her is here.

Endings

Yesterday was the end of my colleague Matt Nelson's life.

A week earlier was another ending, the death of my father, whose funeral was last Friday.  At the funeral, I was reminded of the death of my relative (maternal great-uncle?) Gordon's recent passing at the age of 101.  He survived his wife Erma by 20 years.  Gordon and Erma had lived across the street from the Lutheran church that my mother attended as a child for many decades and were an extra set of grandparents for my brother and I.

Yesterday was the end of the professional football season culminating in the glorious victory of the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl 50 (Super Bowl L for those of you who think they should have stuck to Roman numerals), and likely the end of Denver quarterback Peyton Manning's storied career including the most lifetime wins as a quarter back (200), four tries at the Super Bowl (two wins, two losses), and being the oldest quarterback to lead a Super Bowl team (at 39 years old).  It was a remarkable game.  The Carolina Panthers who were favored to win after losing just one game all season ran some of the most innovative offensive plays in the NFL, featuring lots of quarterback rushing yards, lateral passing and unusual formations.  But, they did themselves no favors with an avalanche of penalties in the second half and were put down soundly by the most effective defense in the NFL (the most valuable player was a Broncos defender and one of the Broncos two touch downs was scored by a member of the defensive team following a turnover) and by the Broncos smart, measured offense.  Lady Gaga proved she could deliver a powerful straight line with the national anthem.  Coldplay's halftime performance was so poor that it will probably hurt their upcoming tour, but was rescued by outstanding performances by Bruno Mars and Beyonce who quite frankly belted not only their own lyrics but also Coldplay's better than their front man. It is the third Broncos Super Bowl in franchise history and oddly reminiscent of the Super Bowl win by John Elway who was himself the oldest Super Bowl quarterback at the time.  Congratulations Broncos! There will be a celebratory parade in downtown Denver from Union Station along 17th Street to Broadway and south to Civic Center tomorrow.

Yesterday was the last day of the East Asian Lunar Year (the lunar calendars used by Jews and Muslims also originate in Asia, even though we more often call it the Near East).  Today is the first day of the year of the Monkey, although celebrations in Taiwan have been muted due to an earthquake that flattened a high rise apartment building, killing several dozen.  About 170 people had escaped alive and another 110 were trapped there or missing as this new year dawned.  The new day will see how many of the rest will live.

Last week was the last pre-primary Republican debate. Tomorrow is the first in the nation New Hampshire primary, in which hometown hero Bernie Sanders is sure to prevail by a large margin among Democrats, and in which Republicans will attempt to cull an overcrowded field.  Hope springs eternal that some of the candidates who are far back in the pack in both Iowa and New Hampshire will decide to throw in the towel at that point, allowing support that has been spread among a variety of "establishment" candidates to coalesce among fewer individuals so that they party can decide who to support for the rest of the contests this spring.

Posting frequency will probably be light here and at sister blog Dispatches From Turtle Island, as I assimilate the endings.

Matt Nelson RIP

My fellow lawyer and colleague Matt Nelson died today after a long battle with cancer.  He died long before his time, but due to some extraordinary cancer treatment, survived almost five years longer than would have otherwise been possible, during the lion's share of which he was in remarkably good health.

He was usually one of the first into the office in the morning, worked solidly, efficiently and quietly each day, interrupted only to discuss our cases or share a bit of goodwill.  His understated and plain writing presented complex concepts simply.  He was always willing to help and always humble.  In his personal life, he thought nothing of comforting others in their times of need even as he toiled cheerfully with a long and sometimes painful medical regime.

We will miss him sorely, and our hearts go out to his family that was blessed to have the time with him that they have had.

Gene E. Willeke Has Died

My father, Gene E. Willeke, died this morning of natural causes at the age of 81.  A funeral will be held later in the week in Oxford, Ohio.  His first wife, Carol B. Willeke, preceded him in death.  He is survived by his brother, Lowell Willeke, his current wife, Pat Willeke, his two sons, Jon Willeke and I, and three grandchildren.

Remembering Arne Blomquist

Arne and Mary Blomquist on a happier day, quite a long time ago (via Kathy Blomquist).

His daughter, Kathy Blomquist, announced that my uncle, Arne Blomquist, died yesterday, an old man, although death always comes too soon.

My mother, who died of breast cancer shortly after retiring, and my Aunt Kay, who died in middle age of M.S. that manifested itself while she was in college, have predeceased him, as did his sister's husband, my uncle Dale, who also had a prolonged and difficult struggle in his final days. Arne is survived by his wife, Mary, his sister Rose, his brother Roger and his brother's wife Trish, his brother-in-law, my father, and his two daughters, Kathy and Chris, as well as nieces, nephews, other relatives on his wife's side whom I don't know, and a lifetime of friends, mostly in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and in Tanzania.

It would be wrong to say he was my "favorite uncle", for I have loved all of my uncles in their own ways. But, of my four uncles and five aunts, he was the one most similar to me who I understood best. Like my late mother, who was his sister, he was vigorously engaged in the world of ideas and cared greatly about the larger world beyond his own personal experience.

To a greater extent than any of his siblings (not unlike my father who grew up in similar circumstances in rural Ohio but then moved on to academia), he fully acclimated into cosmopolitan big city life in the larger world beyond his rural home as if he had been born to it. But, he was never a stranger to the place he grew up and always retained strong ties there.

He was an independent critical thinker who had a tendency to dominate discussions through intelligence, knowledge and force of will. It rankled him just a little sometimes, that my father was older than him, after he had spent his life being the eldest in a large family and the leaders of the Blomquist children, a position in which my lower key father never really challenged him in truth. He didn't worry about offending people he thought were in the wrong, which isn't to say that he lacked social skills. Far from it. He could and did lead people to get things done.

He was the oldest of the two boys and three girls who lived to adulthood in the family, all children of a lumber jack without a college education whose home grown potatoes and vegetables, as well as his fishing and hunting, made the difference between having enough food and not for the family. His father had had an arranged marriage, but Arne and all of the other children married their own chosen mates for love. They grew up in a small house his father helped build himself from a mail order catalog design, with an outhouse, clothes that were dried on a clothesline in the back yard, a washing machine was a hand cranked wringer, and a party line rotary phone.  The house's roof was (and still is) aligned with the North Star.

They were grandchildren of poor Swede-Finn immigrants who picked up only bits and pieces of the Swedish language used at home and at church (mostly expletives, aphorisms, and religious phrases, along with a few names of simple household things). But, he and the other children were, at least in adulthood, in contact with many our Finnish relatives (the Finns are great genealogists, our family has roughly 100,000 relatives documented in privately prepared Finnish genealogies, a substantial share of the entire nation's population and an even larger share of the particular region from which our ancestors emigrated; one is even a Finnish Knight in honor of his life saving work overhauling Finland's water and sewer systems).

Despite tough economic circumstances, Felch in Dickenson County, where they lived, an hour from the nearest decent grocery store in Iron Mountain, has an idyllic character not unlike the fictional town of Lake Woebegone in Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion radio show that I always related to as a child. Life seemed to revolve around coffee cake and weak brewed coffee after services at the local Swedish Lutheran church, the omnipresent forests of firs and birches that surrounded their homes and the lonely rural roads, and hunting stories. So far as I can tell, none of the family has ever perceived themselves as disadvantaged, even though they undoubtedly wanted for a great deal in their youth.

Still, four of the children, including Arne, graduated from college. Rose married young, stayed close to home and had four children in the world she grew up in where she still lives today, where her family has provided Felch and Dickenson County with pillars of the local community.

Arne made a comfortable living for himself and his family in an engineering business and then lost a great deal in a turn of business misfortune. He and his wife Mary paused to reflect and decide what they wanted to do with his life.  Then, they did it, reviving the business and leading a group of committed Minnesotan Lutherans to establish Tanzania's first private university, which is affiliated with the Tanzanian branch of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (the mainline Lutheran denomination).  They found books and professors, guided the students to literally make the bricks with which they then built its buildings, and as much as anything, provided know how and leadership free of the corruption that infects most African bureaucracies. He was particularly proud of the way that the law faculty there created a source of lawyers independent of the government.  Christian churches are powerful across sub-Saharan Africa, we learned from him, because they mobilize communities to take positive action and improve their parishioner's lives.  During his time in Tanzania, he was a U.S. counsel, a position for which the main qualifications in this part of the world are a secure home to keep critical records about Americans and a stable familiarity with the community.  They built a grand cabin and Christmas tree farm in the UP to retire to in their old age, in substantial part with their own labor, the labor of their children and their children's partners, and other family. Then, they persevered when much of it was destroyed in a fire, so that it is now usable again.

His two daughters have displayed similar initiative. He tried to teach them to hunt, although neither was very excited about it. Time sent working for Habitat for Humanity gave them valuable skills. Kathy became an engineer, restored multiple houses with her life partner Mike, and until just recently  when her job was relocated, worked for a Japanese company selling technical equipment. Chris married her high school sweetheart, college best friend and co-adventurer in life, also restoring homes along the way. Chris and her husband now make a living running a non-profit they established in college. Arne wouldn't necessary have made or recommended some of the choices that his daughters made in life, but in the end, he respected their independence, their initiative and their prerogative to make their own decisions, so long as they carried them out purposefully and competently (which they did).

Arne suffered no fools, and understood what it took to make things happen and how the world worked in ways that most people only think they understand. He had a sharp wit until his psychologically agonizing final days when diseases of old age preyed upon this as well as his body over many years.  This was agony for those of us who loved him, especially Mary who always faithfully supported him and advocated for the best possible care for him sustaining him much longer, and much better in the quality of his life, than he would have managed otherwise.  We looked on helpless to prevent the inevitable, which finally arrived in full, yesterday.  The slow progression of the ailments was painful for all, but it has also left us mostly at peace with the inevitable now that it has arrived.

We value the lessons that he taught us over the years, as much by example as through formal instruction. He taught us that you can make your own fate and are not a prisoner of your circumstances. He taught us that ideas and the greater world matter and that you should play a part in shaping that world. He taught us that physical assets and money are inconsequential in importance relative to your own human capital. He taught us that much can be accomplished with hard work, resourcefulness, know how and clarity of purpose. He taught us that having purpose in life and engaging with the world makes your life meaningful and worth living. He taught us how to raise children to be independent, self-directed and effective, yet caring, themselves.

We will all miss him sorely.

This remembrance is prepared solely from my own recollection and memories of my own family's history, and if there are inaccuracies or this post causes any offense, I apologize. Any mistake or offense is my fault and is unintended.

Sometimes Life Sucks

Monty Oum, who was just hitting the big time in his career with his originally web based anime series RWBY (which was recently released on Netflix and had DVD distributions), died on February 1, 2015 (a week ago today), due to a severe allergic reaction during a routine medical procedure at the age of 33.  His funeral was yesterday.  He is survived by Sheena Duquette, his newlywed wife of eight and a half months.

RIP Monty.

Remembering Dale Siegler

My uncle, Dale Siegler, died the evening of September 19, 2012, at a not unnaturally young age, after many months of struggling with a serious health condition that, whatever the precise diagnosis may have been, amounted to natural causes.  He was survive by his wife, four children, many grandchildren, at least one great-grandchild, and many other relatives.

The life that he and my aunt Rose, my mother's sister, lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near my maternal grandparents home, was different from that of most of my maternal relatives. He and Rose had children early, stayed close to home where family support was available, and had many children themselves. Rose's two brothers and my mother all went away to college, found professional careers in big metropolitan areas and raised families with two children each. (Kay, their other sister, had been starting college and headed on the same track when an M.S. diagnosis took he on another course that left her a spinster, blind, and spending her final days, in middle age, in a succession of nursing homes).

Dale had worked in the iron mines were he'd found a job for himself as a newlywed man with a baby daughter for many years, and served as a security guard for the closed mine after it shut down. He and his son and his friends hunted deer in deer season, trapping small furry animals destined for coats and stoles and taxidermy, fished, managed family forests, and was a community and family leader, well liked by all.

I remember watching in awe as a child as he neatly filleted fresh caught lake fish leaving them boneless, with just two or three perfect cuts of his fillet knife. He roamed the woods, first with the kids in the generation of my cousins and me, and then with kids in my children's generations, showing them deer trails and his traps.

The life he lived was not unlike my grandfather who had lived most of his life as a lumberjack supplemented by subsistence farming at a home place nearby tucked into hills and forests. As in Dale's own generation, some of his children moved far away to the big city, and all but a couple of his descendants went to college. However, his grandson, his grandson's wife, and their child lived right across the street from him in their little hamlet, in his final days. I never heard the slightest twinge of regret in his voice or his eyes over the road he had taken, although he was always eager to discover what we had experienced.

Despite the fact that his home in a town found in a list of Michigan Ghost Towns was further away from any city of any consequence than my paternal grandparent's place in Dola, Ohio, his world in Northern Michigan always seemed less insular. Perhaps it was the fact that their church retained stronger ties to Swedish speaking Finland. Perhaps the mining companies and tourist oriented operations that dotted the birch and fir forests had more connections to the rest of the world. Perhaps Rose's siblings and his children provide more of a connection to the larger world.

We will also miss him now as those whom he has left behind live his legacy.

Stop Thinking About Zombies

National zombie awareness month is over folks.  Get with the program.  Stop thinking about zombies already.  Perhaps not coincidentally, National Drug Court Month is also over. 

Tomorrow is the 68th anniversary of D-Day.

June is LGBT Pride Month (i.e. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual Pride Month), a designation that commemorates the Stonewall Riots.  Bill Clinton made the proclamation in 2000, and President Obama has done so again in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.  Denver always makes a good showing with Pridefest which is June 16-17, this year.

Also surely not coincidentally, it is also now, Fae Awareness Month (i.e. Fairy Awareness Month), which also ties to Fae Centric the Shakespeare Play, a Midsummer's Night Dream (I once played the father of one of the heroines in it), even though June is host to the first day of summer and not Midsummer.  This year in Colorado, the summer solstice, which marks the beginning of summer, is at approximately 5:09 p.m. on June 20, 2012.  Notwithstanding this discrepency, however, Swedes and Finns celebrate the civil holiday of Midsummer's Day on the third Friday in June.

American's observe Father's Day, the poor and insignificant counterpart to Mother's Day, for which the traditional present is a neck tie (despite their declining popularity), on June 17, 2012.

Today is also street cleaning day on my side of the street.  Alas, our block failed to have perfect performance today in removing cars from that side of the street, as my next door neighbor (whom I dutifully tried to alert by knocking on her door before she got a ticket) had left her car parked on the street but was not home.  It is the first street cleaning day since she moved in, and nobody actually reads the fine print on the street signs and put it on the calendar, so she is not really morally blameworthy for her err and I really should have left her a note in advance as a warning.  I've been caught out myself several times in twelve years living in my beloved neighborhood, including the first time.

Finally, I'd like to take a moment to observe the passing of Ed Quillen, a Denver Post columnist noted for his insights about current events informed by Colorado history.  He also brought to my attention such useful concepts as the "Stupid Zone."  He passed too early at the age of sixty-one and will be missed.  By all accounts, he has not become a zombie at this point.

Larry Ribstein Died Christmas Eve

Law professor Larry Ribstein, best known as a pre-eminent scholar of limited liability company law, died on on Christmas Eve of a stroke. More rememberances can be found here. I have regularly used his treatise, Ribstein & Keatinge on Limited Liability Companies, and have heard him speak on the subject. He was highly influential in the drafting of the Colorado's laws on the subject.

Rolo The Dog Remembered

It happened a year and a half ago, but Rolo the dog, whose owner I represented in an appeal while the dog was on doggie death row (successfully) died in the summer of 2010, about two and a half years later than he would have had he been euthenized, at the age of eight. Farewell, Rolo.

An Alanis Morissette Moment For A Great Scientist

If Alanis Morissette had know about today's bittersweet award of a Nobel Prize in Medicine to Ralph M. Steinman(for “his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity”), who died the Friday before the award was announced today, Ms. Morissette probably would have included him in her song.

I share the sentiment that while "[a]ccording to the present rules the Nobel can only be awarded posthumously when the Laureate dies after the announcement", "I hope that sense will prevail and the award will stand."

More Than Three Years Of Grief

A significant share of mental health issues are congenital. But, episodes of severe stress, grief and trauma don't fit this pattern. Miscarriage and stillbirth is one common, but profound stressor.

Women who have lost babies to miscarriage and stillbirth experience unusually high levels of depression and anxiety during new pregnancies and for nearly three years after delivering healthy infants. . . . Many women become depressed and anxious after losing a baby during pregnancy, and these reactions often persist after carrying another child to term[.]

From here.

Infant morality is now much lower than it used to be, so few Americans will have to bury very young children, something that my grandparents and almost all of the generations before them often experienced. But, it is estimated that about one in three pregnancies ends with a miscarriage or stillbirth, which means that the average American woman will experience at least one in a lifetime.

My mother experienced this before I was born. My wife and I experienced this before our children were born. Even people who welcome pregnancies routinely keep this very private for the first three months, when the risk of a miscarriage is greatest, so that they won't have to endure the discomfort of explaining what happened to everyone who knew.

This is one of the more emotionally potent experiences that a person can encounter. When it happened to us, we remembered it in a little ceremony for just the two of us in the mountains. For better, or for worse, this grief is rarely a community event. It can be a painful, silent, lonely grief.

People are resilient. Eventually, they do reach a point where the present overwhelms the potency of life's past heartbreaks. But, the time it takes to reach that point is often much longer than the pregnancy itself.

Remembering Clark Bouton

Clark Bouton, my neighbor, my friend, and my client, died on early on the morning of February 22, 2011 at the age of eighty at Denver Hospice. He was a neighbor not just in the sense of someone who lived half a block away, but in the sense of being almost family. Many of my readers at this blog knew him.

Clark was a retired philosophy professor. But, philosophy is a calling from which you never really retire. When I visited him at the hospice earlier this month, he was reading a monograph on philosophical pragmatism. The author, he joked with me, had written ten books basically arguing that philosophy was a bunch of bunk. He wasn't afraid to expose ideas he'd spent a long life accumulating to new challenges, even when he knew the end was near. He watched the democracy protests in Egypt unfold with a gleam in his eye at seeing the values he'd devoted his life to prevailing in the world.

Clark wasn't content to limit his philosophical endeavors to the ivory towers of France he'd prowled during his academic career. He put his principles into action. We walked blocks together distributing political materials in our precinct. He was active volunteering for the Colorado Progressive Coalition, particularly working to make health care more widely available for our community. He did leg work, helping to conduct community forums on health care across the state, while also providing behind the scenes strategic suggestions. He was a Democrat by political affiliation, but his politics were more in tune with those of the bold movement politics of the European left than they were with the triangulation, band aid solutions and short term political tactics that are so common in these days in American politics. He excelled at keeping his focus on what was important, rather than getting sidetracked by trivialities. Yet, despite his strongly held political beliefs, he knew about to enter into civil discourse and even friendships with conservative neighbors and political players, looking for common ground and respecting their personal dignity in an effort to find solutions that everyone who sincerely cared about the greater good could accept.

Even when I first met him, more than a decade ago, he was frank. He'd had cancer, wasn't afraid to tell you his age, and was well aware of his own mortality. But, this didn't discourage him or leave him resigned to his fate. Like my own father, also a cancer survivor, this awareness gave Clark a sense of urgency. He cheerfully, but tirelessly, worked to get things done. There wasn't time to waste. Talking with him over wine and cheese, he always had a point to make or a sharp observation that no one else in the room could have added. He was a proud intellectual, but also had a deep sense of solidarity with the working man.

Clark's later years weren't restricted to politics. He tied flies. He knew a great deal about art, despite claiming to be only a humble novice. He appreciated good coffee, good wine and exquisite fresh salads. He routinely embarked on ambitious handyman projects that would have sent me running for a professional contractor. He gardened. He grappled hard with how to do the best thing to help his children when they hit rough spots in life. He was one of those people who could read a few instructions and readily grasp just how some new endeavor needed to be carried out. He was fearless when it came to taking on new challenges and learning new tricks. He considered himself a fortunate man to have the kind of life that he did. He reveled in his good fortune, lest it go to waste.

After enough forceful suggestions from his body that his days were up, he faced death gracefully, as only someone who has had a well examined life can. We will miss him. We will value the contributions that he made to our lives, and we will recall him as an example of a life well lived.

Benoît Mandelbrot R.I.P.

Benoît Mandelbrot died October 14, 2010.

He is the father of the fractals and the mathematics of chaos. He offered us these memorable words:

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

He brought mathematical rigor to the messiness of reality without the oversimplification that his predecessors had been forced to resort to and showed us how seeming randomness and immense detail can emerge from simple, deterministic mathematical formulas. The impact of this insight on how we understand the very nature of the universe rivals the insights of Newton (the a small number of natural laws explain most of what we observe in the world), Einstein (that time and space dimensions are themselve malleable in accordance with certain physical laws) and the collective discoverers of quantum mechanics (that the laws of physics are effectively laws of probability rather than being apparently deterministic).

Mandelbrot's insights, for example, explain how slight randomness at an infinitessimal scale can limit the extent to which even massive phenomena like weather can be predicted.

The alternative definition he provided for a "dimension" as he used the concept in the context of "fractal dimensions" continues to motivate theoretical physics in areas like loop quantum gravity, where that definitional strategy can show how a four dimensional world can emergently arise from a system of nodes and connections where no coordinate system is initially defined that could help to explain at a deep level some of the oddest apparent properties of quantum mechanics, like its apparent non-locality, a possibility quickly ruled out by mere simplifyinig assumptions in the real analysis that undergirds conventional mathematical physics.

Tragedy

I've spent many long hours in maternity wards telling myself that this doesn't happen any more, but sometimes it does.

Arizona State Treasurer Dean Martin's wife, Kerry, died Monday, four hours after giving birth, followed about forty-eight hours later by their newborn first child, Austin. Both died of complications of childbirth.

Take a moment to share this great sorrow.

Mourning Angie Zapata

Eighteen year old Angie Zapata was murdered in Greeley, Colorado on July 17, 2008 in her apartment.

One possible motive for the crime is that, at one time, she was known as Justin Zapata. It could have been a hate crime targeted at her because she was a transgender women.

She "craved friends, family and teen pursuits such as talking on the telephone and using a camera. . . . and dreamed of being Miss Latina. 'Her appearance meant everything to her other than being on her phone or taking pictures,' according to the obituary."

A public funeral service was held July 23, 2008, at The Healing Place, in Brighton, Colorado (an affiliate of The Foursquare Church). At the bilingual religous service she was remembered by friends and family:

The way she would spoil her niece and nephew, even quitting a job to take care of them, as two friends reminisced during the service. The way she loved roses, the colors red and black, and way she always made sure her makeup was good -- even simply when taking a trip to Wal-Mart.

Perhaps, most of all, however, was the way she never backed down from who she was, instead saving the energy to care for her friends and family.

"She was always happy," said Alicia Portillo, one of Angie's friends. "She loved music. She didn't care what people thought of her. She always just wanted to be who she was and that was female and to be loved."

Portillo even said Zapata's courage helped her with her own identity as a lesbian.

"Angie gave me the power to not care what people thought of me."

The statement released by Angie Zapata's sister Monica Zapata on behalf of her family stated:

We want the whole community involved to find this person who hurt my sister and to let everyone be aware that all she wanted was to be beautiful. We want this violence to end. Transgender people deserve to be treated with respect.

According to the Greeley Tribune:

A search warrant for Zapata's apartment in the 2000 block of 4th Street indicates the victim suffered fatal wounds to the head and face. . . .Her body was found Thursday [July 17, 2008] in the apartment, according to the warrant. After family members were unable to reach her by telephone, her sister went to the house and got a key from the landlord. She found Zapata lying on the living room floor, covered by a blanket. She was already dead.

The identity and motives of her killer are unknown, although one blog states that:

Police indicate that they have information that might lead to an arrest and have not ruled out that this might be a hate crime but they have also indicated that the killer or killers might be acquaintances of the victim.

The police have asked for help from the public:

Police are looking for Zapata's car, a green 2003 Chrysler PT Cruiser with Colorado license plate number 441-ORN. There is a hubcap missing on the front passenger side and paint missing on the front bumper of the driver's side under the headlight. . . . Anyone with information about Zapata's murder should call Greeley police at 970-350- 9600.

According to this blog (repeated at a couple of other places):

Donations in Angie Zapata’s honor maybe made at Academy Bank in Wal-Mart, 60 W. Bromley Lane or checks made payable to Monica Murquia may be mailed to Colorado Anti-Violence Program, P.O. Box 181085, Denver, CO 80218.

This world seems to have too many senseless tragedies. Angie Zapata's murder was one of them. There are too few answers.

B.C. Comic Author Dead

Johnny Hart, who writes newspaper comic strip B.C. and was a co-creator of comic strip Wizard of Id, is dead.

His humor brought joy to hundreds of millions of people. But, his sensibilities remained not far from where he started in the comic business, in the 1950s (not surprisingly conservative editorial comic Mallard Fillmore frequently picks up visual themes from B.C.)

Economist Joseph Schumpeter (whose signature phrase "Creative Destruction" is the name of one of my sidebar blogs), was famous for noting, among other things, that those prominent in new economic orders were rarely those who were prominent in the previous one.

Hart represents a man deeply immersed in what I sometimes think of as the God and County worldview. The drawings in his comics were simple, exaggerated line drawings and he also developed a reputation as something of a crummugen for his bold, simple and witty, but black and white portrayal of his faith on those pages. He came of age at the dawn of the Cold War and cut his teeth doing comics for Stars and Stripes (a military publication) while in the Air Force. He was a young man when the Eisenhower administration put "In God We Trust" on coins, "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Fraternal Order of the Eagles put the Ten Commandments in stone in front of every small town city hall they could find. Back then, few people admitted to being atheists, Hollywood was suspect (and was ground zero of McCarthy's Red Scare). The ceremonial God and Country deism that took hold then was largely a reaction to the atheism as government policy of the Soviet Union, our Cold War adversary.

Just a little later the Civil Right movement went from a simmer to a boil, the 1960s took hold, and almost everybody in the entertainment and teaching professions adopted tolerance and an embrace of diversity as defining life principles. Generation X grew up uncomfortable with the notion that any faith or country should be entitled to unquestioned supremacy, saw the world in shades of gray, and became more sophisticated consumers of Hollywood than any generation that had come before us.

The ACLU has spent half a century working with my generation to undo Eisenhower's cultural legacy. But, ultimately, the change in our nation's worldview won't come from changed minds, although many minds have changed over time as our world's culture has transformed. It will happen because men like Johnny Hart will pass, one by one, while people of my generation come to the fore. As John Mayer puts it, "one day our generation
is gonna rule the population."

Johnny Hart wasn't a bad man. He lived a wonderful life and offered the world a great deal of wisdom. But, the new generation has come of age in a different time and has different insights to offer. The new generation is now stepping to the plate, and in time, our own ideas and defining cultural struggles will no longer be the ones our world most needs. Then, we too will pass the torch to a new generation.

A Sad Day

My cousin Conor Willeke died in a motorcycle accident in Durango on Sunday. He was 28 years old and had a bright future ahead of him.

My Colorado relatives have had more than their share of tragedy. This death (and they also face the death of another relative to M.S. at about the same time) just compounds it. I mourn with them.

Mourning James Kim, Oberlin College '93

My wife and I had pretty much convinced ourselves that James Kim, the San Francisco man who died of hypothermia in Southern Oregon, while trying to hike to find help for his wife and two young children, wasn't the James Kim we went to college with.

After all, Kim is a dime a dozen name in California, and James was a popular name for boys in 1971. But, his age wasn't reassuring, and lots of Korean Americans in our circle of friends and family had moved to the West Coast when they got out of college. Today, I took a moment to investigate. Wikipedia was the bearer of bad news. The James Kim who died was the man we'd known as a classmate.

Kim made a career out of bringing technology to the world through his job at CNET. But, this time technology failed. It's easy to forget just how close a world beyond the urban safety net is, when you live in it every day. Before our children were born, my wife and I once nearly got our car stuck in the snow on a dirt road in Colorado's mountains, on the 4th of July. Out there, in the wilderness, the unexpected can happen, things can go wrong, you have to make decisions with imperfect information, and your choices can be a matter of life and death. Nobody is lucky enough to always make the right call when faced with imperfect information.

Our hearts are with his family at this horrible moment.