Jennifer V. a young mother of three, working 40 plus just to be poor, was shot and killed, along with one customer, in the dark hours of Sunday morning at my former place of work. The police are engaged in a manhunt for the 19 year old male suspect, who, according to reports, shot and killed both victims after Jennifer V. had already given up the money. Not for anything would I trade places with this man when the local authorities find him, they were in our store often and they liked Jennifer.
Nothing I say from this point on is meant to offer absolution or excuse to the man who did this. We are all products of consumption culture; most of us negotiate and/or fight the class war without taking lives. This man’s weakness of spirit and mind has robbed more then a gas station. He has robbed three little girls of a mother and in her place given those girls a Christmas they will long wish to forget. You will find no excuses for this crime and no indictment against what methods are brought to bear against its perpetrator in this article only the words of a class warrior who now has a face to put on the casualties of that conflict and must give vent to the resultant bile before it consumes his mind.
The first question in such a crime is in fact the easiest to answer; that question of course is why. The answer is money. Money is what drives people to do almost everything and most particularly those things that inspire the worst sort of shock in us all. Less then three hundred dollars in this case would be the sum that the criminal in question placed on two (possibly three depending on how he is caught and sentenced) human lives. Seven dollars and seventy-five cents an hour is what the company feels is just compensation for someone to remain in that store, at a dangerous crossroads in the dangerous hours of the night and morning. The just cause for which they remain open those hours; a handful of tobacco, beer, and coffee sales they would miss if the store was dark while the pumps still served those with electronic payment methods.
We can’t speak of this tragedy without thinking of this season which makes it all the more tragic. This season which has gone from a time of hope and sharing for all, to being a time of despair and insecurity for most so that companies can ramp up sales by ramping up our materialistic instincts and force feeding those instincts to our children so much so that a young woman would put herself in that sort of danger because it gives a paycheck. Even now I try to think of what I will get for three little girls I have never met and their father because even I am so much a product of this culture I can’t think how to express my own empathy with their tragedy without offering them some material compensation.
Why is easy to answer, what is a little harder. What could we do to grind to a halt this materialism that drives the poor to murder the poor? What can we do to let companies know that it’s not worth it to operate their businesses at such questionable hours? What would have taken place that Sunday morning had I not been fired? What would the criminal have done if it had been three people in the store and not two? I should be celebrating that I am alive and that it is only three little girls mourning this Christmas and not four but how do you not ask ‘what if my presence could have been the tip of the scales that made the criminal just turn back into the cold’. Would the money have been worth one more life?
In memory of Jennifer and Jeff.