Notes of Concern…
…..Jackson Blair
THE DEATH OF PROMISE
I watched the television with a knot in my stomach.
It showed surveillance camera footage of a happy and attractive young woman going to work in a laboratory building on the campus of one of the nation’s finest universities.
It wasn’t after dark. It wasn’t a holiday. It was just a normal day and the time on the camera read 10AM.
She walked with a happy sure step. After all, she was a young woman, capable and accomplished, soon to earn a PhD from Yale. She was engaged to a young man attending Columbia University in New York. In fact, in just a matter of days she would wed her young man.
The surveillance cameras did not get the chance to record her exit from the building. She never came out of that seemingly safe campus building, into which she walked in the broad daylight of a New Haven day, full of promise, excitement, and trying to get in a little last minute work.
We do not know what happened to her in that building. There were many others in the building. None of them admit to any knowledge of what happened to her, or even where she might have gone. All anyone knew was that she never went home.
All her fiancé knew was that on the day they were to be married he was told her body had been found. She had been strangled and stuffed into a wall in the basement of the building.
Gone was the hope, the excitement, the happiness and the promise.
In its place arrived fear, horror, death to dreams and a reminder that we are often not safe even in what we consider to be the safest of places.
It is every parent’s nightmare.
It is why we must be eternally vigilant not only for our own safety but for the safety of those we love and those with whom we work.
Yale is a sophisticated place. The building in which the woman worked could only be accessed with special swipe cards. Certain areas within the building could only be accessed with special swipe cards. Surveillance cameras were in place. People who worked there had photo ID’s.
To what end?
The fickle finger of fate pointed at young one young woman that awful day.
And now we will not know what she might have brought to the world around her, what accomplishment, what happiness, and what discovery.
All we know is that someone a lot less promising, a person with dark thoughts, someone who wanted to take something away, took the life of this beautiful young woman.
How terribly sad it is.
How awful things like this happen as often as they do.
Take care of yourself and those you love my friends. It can be dangerous “out there.”
