I learned this morning, as I was making my coffee, that Amy Bishop tried to commit suicide yesterday in an Alabama jail. This has been a bad week for Amy, after she was indicted on Wednesday for first-degree murder, in the 1986 shotgun killing of her 18-year-old brother, Seth Bishop. The contours of a slaying of her sibling have earmarks of equal footing, in relative terms of controversy, as do the notorious multiple Huntsville, Alabama shootings.
You must recognize this, Amy is indeed a most troubled lady. I do hope she recovers comfortably from the slitting of one of her wrists, but I do not want this crazy woman to see the light of day again, or to be out and about in our free general public, where she can reek more of her horrid havoc. For Amy practices a breed of witchcraft that is just too hard to fathom for the average guy (or girl).
Let me not purloin one more gracious grain of sand from the hourglass of your life, which hovers like a silhouette on a wanton blistering sidewalk; it’s a Tombstone high-noon hourglass in a Gary Cooper matinee! To the meat of the matter-the IHOP altercation of March 16th, 2002. The flap took place in Peabody, Massachusetts, well before Amy took a teaching position in the biology department of the University of Alabama. As such, Bishop left a perfectly nice lady basking in tears, a nice lady by the name of Michelle Gjika.
Michelle makes a simple request to a waitress for a booster seat to accommodate one of her children. The waitress promptly brings the booster seat over to her, but this was the last one in stock at the moment, at this specific IHOP outlet. Amy Bishop, who seems to have arrived at this Peabody location simultaneously as Michelle, also requests a booster seat for her youngster. Here’s when things start to get sticky.
Remember, the last high-chair had been taken. Amy’s ire began to grow. It grew and grew to an enormous balloon of anger. The ire bursts forth from the lips of the Harvard scholar: “But we were here first!” Sounds like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Foul language, like so many dead bullfrogs, poured forth from the trap of an enraged AB. An utterance of outrageous entitlement further spews forth from her loose-jaws: “I am Dr. Amy Bishop.”
Big deal, you are probably thinking. At this point, the cursing and shouting was so loud that everyone in the IHOP could hear her. “Can we not enjoy our flapjacks, maple syrup, and convivial chit-chat?” This is a simulation of what good and grumpy customers were probably saying or certainly thinking. The manager comes over to her table and warns her to pipe down. Later he told police, Bishop behaved “like a crazy person.” Finally, the manager was forced into asking Amy to leave the restaurant. No one could enjoy their spicy omelet brunch or share relaxing antidotes of occupational gossip going forward.
Suddenly, Bishop bops the other woman (Michelle Gjika) upside her head. The smack or blow was delivered to the right side of Michelle’s head, and was done with her two kids witnessing the atrocity with their own two (I mean four) eyes. A miffed Bishop splits the scene at this time, but not before an observant manager records the license plate number of her red 1988 Ford Taurus. Verbal assault and physical assault was all she left behind.
This is just an observation, but Amy seems to wear red frequently. Red, for me, is a color of ire, and so it would seem to be a proper fit for this cursing woman, whose temper can be set off by the smallest speck of a trifle. Even the ching-a-ling of a popsicle truck could inspire a temper-tantrum, from what I’ve read in newspaper reports. Just a helpful suggestion (I’ve thought of) for criminal psychiatrists, but anger appears to be AB’s Achilles Heel.
Not much of a mystery to this. The Peabody police are called to the IHOP and interview poor Gjika and the many witnesses to this brunchie smorgasbord of bad behavior. An interview with Amy results in a completely different version of events. She says that, on the contrary, Gjika was the aggressor. Nonetheless, Bishop is charged with a bunch of major crimes: assault and battery as well as disorderly conduct.
Yea, they throw the book at her, but it misses the lucky moll entirely. Just hits the wall and lands with a thud on the floor. The Essex County district attorney wants to teach her a lesson and recommends one year of probation and anger management classes. But it looks like Bishop cajoles the authorities and admits to her guilt; but she plays on the heartstrings of the prosecutor and swears she won’t let it happen again.
I sure wish she had attended those anger management classes, classes that could have taught her a valuable lesson. If Amy had learned how to control her firecracker temper, then maybe three professors would still be alive and three other wounded professors would be restored to their original health. Only leniency or latitude was ultimately applied in this IHOP episode. All she got was six months of unsupervised probation.
Not even a slap on the wrist for the bad, bad girl. Remind you of anything? Yea, she never got in any trouble at all before when she ‘accidentally’ blasted her own dear brother in the gut with a 12-gauge shotgun, 14 years prior (to 2002 IHOP buffoonery). So the moral to our fable today is as transparent as Irish spring water, IF YOU DO THE CRIME, YOU HAVE TO DO THE TIME!
An extension to this, is that if you have an imbalanced individual who is already a narcissistic sociopath of a schizophrenic, an individual who fancies herself as the cream of the crop, the Belle of the Ball, or even as the next Marie Curie in chemistry, you might as well hang it up if you let her get away with a crime Scott free, because she’ll see an opening in the canyon as wide as a Mack truck, and will plow a path of destruction as wide as Katrina shaking up the briny bayous of Louisiana.
