This Was Murder

It's not that I hadn't seen a dead person before.
I had.
I was at my grandmother's open casket funeral.
And it wasn't that I wasn't familiar with death.
I was.
Many people somewhere in my life have died.

But this wasn't just a dead person.
This was a victim.
And this wasn't just death.
This was murder.

As he took me through the experience,
he showed me the apartment complex.
He showed me the shabby yard littered with broken toys
and other garbage.
He showed me the front door of the apartment.
And then he showed me her body.

Movies and TV has desensitized me to violence and murder,
but in the back of my mind, I always knew those weren't more than actors
holding their breath.

But there was something about her face.
Something about the way she looked
through those eyes.
With nothing behind them anymore.
Just an empty body on the carpet in front of me.

As we went on, he showed me the blanket
that had been draped over her face.
He showed me the abrasions on her shoulder.
And then he showed me the shoe print on her neck.

This was real.
This happened.
Still looking at her face, her eyes,
I imagined what she must have been feeling
when she had that boot pressed against her throat.
What it must have felt like to be at the mercy of someone
that would go as far as stomping on her neck
in order to kill her.

We jumped a few days, and he showed me the autopsy.
He showed me all the trauma she sustained.
He showed me what bruises look like
when blood stops pumping through the body.
And then he showed me her tongue,
cut from her throat.

A sure sign of strangulation is a broken hyoid bone.
In order to see if it's broken, it, attached to the tongue,
must be removed from the body and examined.

It was broken.
We were finished.

My reaction at that point surprised me.
I felt light headed, began to sweat, and felt sick.
And it was totally visceral.
My mind couldn't handle such a shock.
This was too real.
On the surface, this was just like any other murder movie.
But my brain could tell the difference.
And my brain let me know.

Something about the was she looked
through those eyes
with nothing behind them anymore
really got through to me.

It's not that I hadn't seen a dead person before.
I had.
But this was victim.
And it wasn't that I wasn't familiar with death.
I was.
But this was murder.
This was different.