-- FOR DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE to human life, there can t be many stories that compare to the so-called Highway Killings. When 11 women over a three-month period of 1988 were abducted, assaulted, slaughtered and then dumped one at a time alongside the roadways around New Bedford, depraved indifference to human life was seen as a necessary trait of some unknown killer. Now, though, after nearly 20 years, it seems only reasonable to ask: How far does this indifference go?
Who among us ever cared a bit about these women? Anyone? Anyone besides their immediate families?
Or maybe we have reached some new point in human evolution where we can just sweep up 11 murders into the dustbin of history and move on as if it never happened. Print another paper full of faraway wars. Broadcast another news hour full of celebrity fluff.
Elect another politician full of blather about our children s welfare. After nearly 20 years, we might all be asking ourselves: At what point does averting our eyes to the horrors of the Highway Killings become an abdication of our responsibilities as fellow citizens? At what point is it no longer acceptable to simply gloss over the police and prosecutors as incompetent, inferior, corrupt, no matter how much they may be stymied by the complexity of the case, or ill-equipped to handle the rigors of such a massive undertaking?
Can we at least acknowledge that by now, their failings have become our failings and their indifference ours? Ask the police today, and they point to the district attorney s office as the place to go for answers on any investigation that may be under way. Ask the district attorney, and he will tell you he is working on it.
He held a press conference to announce a new phone number and to introduce a new employee who has been assigned to this and some 70 other so-called cold cases that have piled up. He had police rip up a concrete patio for the cameras. He sent an assistant to prosecute the wife of a former district attorney.
(Sheila Martines Pina is the wife of New Bedford lawyer Ronald Pina, who was district attorney at the time of the killings. She is currently in jail for drunk driving, and is notable as well as one of the keys to unearthing the truths of the Highway Killings because of her own abduction in April 1988; as Matt Lauer s former co-star on PM Magazine, on Channel 10 in Providence; and as the region s top tourism official for the past 18 years, until she was fired last winter.) There s not much I can say at this juncture for obvious reasons, Bristol County Dist.
-- FOR DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE to human life, there can t be many stories that compare to the so-called Highway Killings.
News RSS