Unreported Violence

It's a shame that police departments generally downplay violence in the home.

There is, near Avondale, a two-litre Frosty Friends ice cream tub,
filled to the top with water and dead flowers.
It’s hard to make out what kind of flowers the dead blooms used to be —
they are submerged and decomposing. There are four fabric flowers
standing in the same dirty water, two red roses, two cream, and they
look forlorn and forgotten, left out in the middle of a hard-packed
parking lot for cars parked while their owners head to St. John’s for
work.
The ice cream tub has a strange sort of dignity: on a Sunday afternoon,
there are two pickup trucks left in the lot, and nothing else. The ice
cream tub is far enough out into the lot that it must occasionally be
in the way, but no one has picked it up and thrown it into the straggly
spruce and bog that backs onto the lot, and no one has carried it down
to the river that jets under the road and thrown it in, so that the tub
and its chosen cargo can speed down on the rushing water to the sea.
At least, not yet.
There’s no note or marking to say why the flowers are there, but you
can make an educated guess what they are a memorial for: two bodies
were found in a pickup truck parked on the lot not that long ago,
marking the fourth case in just over a year where two people have died
in this province in cases that the police almost immediately had
nothing to say about.
Four cases, right across the province, involving eight dead, four cases
that look — from the outside — suspiciously as if domestic violence was
involved.
To be clear here — eight people are dead. It’s a number worth thinking
about, especially given the intense media examination surrounding the
discovery of eight dead bodies in a farmer’s field near London, Ont.
Handled differently
If nothing else, it brings into sharp relief the different way
different kinds of homicide are treated.
In all of the Newfoundland and Labrador cases, the police have
basically said that they are not looking for any other suspects. Just
the way police use the term “no foul play is suspected” to tell the
media about suicides, they use not looking for suspects to indicate
that the deaths were either double suicides or murder suicides — or
perhaps even an accidental death followed by a suicide.
Perhaps you can look at these cases and claim it’s just the law of
averages, that there are a certain number of cases where
murder-suicides occur in any jurisdiction, and our numbers are just
coincidentally high right now, making up for years where the statistics
might have been lower.
But you wonder if, with such a concentration of deaths — and with the
near-silence around them — whether someone with the power to do so
might wake up one morning and suggest a public inquiry is needed to
look at all eight deaths, if for no other reason than to see if there
is some root cause that has brought so many families so much tragedy.
We don’t need any more ice cream tub memorials.
Questions left unanswered
Perhaps what we need is some clear and honest answers, as painful as it
is undoubtably going to be for the family members left behind.
If the ice cream tub had been thrown into the river, it would have spun
down on the spring flood to join into another flushed and swollen
river, and from there, to the two-lane highway bridge where the river
meets the sea. If the tub stayed upright, it and the flowers would have
swept past five sea ducks bobbing in a fan-shaped formation where the
fresh water mixes with salt, and swiftly out into Conception Bay, just
another handful of trash.
Then, it would be quickly forgotten — but not any more quickly than the
event it marks has clearly been.
Russell Wangersky is the editor of The Telegram. He can be reached by
e-mail at rwanger@thetelegram.com.
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