Published: November 03, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Serial Killer Anthony Sowell Free To Kill With Impunity
By Robert Paul Reyes
"As police investigators attempt to positively identify the remains of six murdered females found on the East Side property of a registered sex offender, I'm left wondering what is the point of government, neighborhoods and families, if we fail to sound alarms and investigate when people disappear?
There are no alien abductions. People don't just vanish into thin air. So when they go missing, how is it that they go unnoticed by an entire community?
Or does it somehow depend on the community in question, the families who populate that community and the officers who police it?
My question specifically concerns Anthony Sowell, who is in jail held on the suspicion that he raped and choked a woman in September, at the home where the bodies were later found.
How is it that Sowell, who served 15 years for an extremely violent rape and was required to register with the sheriff's office every 90 days, was not more closely watched?"
Phillip Morris, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer raises some important points about this disturbing case.
I live in a working class neighborhood, and I don't know most of my neighbors by name. But if someone spends an inordinate amount of time digging holes in his backyard it would capture my attention, and I would probably place an anonymous call to the police. We don't have a neighborhood watch program, but we tend to look out for each other. The lady who lives next door to me is over 90-years-old, and I help her out as much as I can. She in turn talks to my dogs over the fence that separates our properties when I am at work. We're not a close knit neighborhood, but we aren't strangers to each other. I can't conceive of the possibility of one of my neighbors being a serial killer who buries his victims in his backyard.
In transient neighborhoods with a lot of rental properties it's not easy to develop a sense of community, but there's always one or two stay at home residents who know everything that's going on. It's incumbent upon these folks to alert the authorities when they sense that there's an illegal activity occurring in their block.
It's a sad indictment on our society that the police weren't keeping a closer watch on this registered sex offender, and it's unforgivable that his neighbors didn't detect that there was something rotten in Denmark, as in ten corpses buried in the creep's backyard.
Do serial killers have carte blanche to murder with impunity in low income communities? Do the authorities only investigate murders with all due diligence if the victims live in exclusive neighborhoods? Are we so jaded that we don't care if a serial killer is piling up bodies on his property as long as he doesn't cull victims from our neck of the woods? Do we only pay attention to murders when the victims are young white women?
These are some of the questions that I just can't shake. What about you my dear readers, do you have any comments?
Robert Paul Reyes is a NewsBlaze writer on Politics, Pop Culture and Pointless Pontificating. Contact him by writing to NewsBlaze.
* The views of Opinion writers do not necessarily reflect the views of NewsBlaze
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