Where Are You, Saint Geneviéve?

[Oiks! For the first time in Contratimes history, I have posted an essay that BEGAN with a dangling participle, and a funny one at that. Those of you familiar with this blog know that I am obsessed with proper grammar and spelling. Of course, occasionally I work a verbal flourish or two into my posts, experimenting with language. I am bound to get burned by such bold(!) risk-taking. Nevertheless, I will not take the risk of leaving that dangling monstrosity here for you to find. It's gone. Apologies! And to you verbal sticklers, yes, I am quite aware that I've kept a sentence fragment in line two. ]

It was one of the worst stories ever. Until Saturday.

About ten years ago, on a warm summer evening around dinnertime, while I was driving home from a day at the newspaper office, the New Hampshire Major Crime Unit vehicle, blue lights a-flashing, zoomed past me. I spun around, clicked on my radio scanner, and accelerated in hot pursuit. That the vehicle was going anywhere was big news, sent as it was from the state capital toward any serious crime. So my giving chase was proper for a staff photographer. Plus, I had a nose for big news: this just FELT like something big.

The Crime Unit team made little conversation on the radio (big news is for a while a big secret), but they made great headway on the highway. I could easily lose track of their van-like vehicle, since it was traveling at a high rate of speed with lights and sirens at the ready. So I had to rely on my own experience as a news "first responder," guessing the vehicle's route and dodging traffic lights with several high-rev rushes down side-streets. Eventually the crime squad traveled out of my paper's coverage area, being now four towns away from the center of my paper's more eastern interests. But I went ahead anyway, down windy roads, finally tucking my car right behind the vehicle's bumper. Then, rather suddenly, we came to a police roadblock. The major crime team went ahead, and I was sent packing, now more than 30 miles from where I had started.

But I didn't let it go. I sped over to the nearby shanty of a store and asked what the fuss was about. It seems that a highway worker, weedwhacking the lonely guardrails by an old, tiny, roadside quarry, was in the right place, in the right time, in the right light. For he just happened to look into the quarry's normally murky waters: there, floating 3 feet from the bottom was a naked human body, chained and anchored to the quarry's dark deeps.

Immediately I called the daily paper that covered that small town, a town on the very fringes of most newspapers. I spoke to the reporter on duty. He had not heard a thing. He'd be right down.

The story turned out to be one of abject horror. A young learning-disabled man, well-known in his sleepy little western Massachusetts town, had been befriended by some notorious, sick-minded hillbilly-types. They were townies all. For reasons still unclear, this young man was abducted by his "friends." He was chained to a radiator in an upstairs bedroom in a house these men shared. There he was held for months, hardly without food. He was burned, electrocuted, raped and sodomized repeatedly. He was fed feces. He eventually died and was hauled up to New Hampshire.

When the medical examiner submitted his report, he stated that the victim was the most tortured victim he had ever seen. If I am not mistaken, the victim had lost over 100 pounds during his ordeal. He was emaciated beyond description: he weighed about 60 pounds.

Eventually, all perpetrators were caught (one not far from here), convicted, sentenced, and sent away. One story emerged about the ring leaders, two brothers behind the scheme, who were true hicks raised in violence. In fact, a few years before the crime, upon the death of their father -- a man notoriously defiant of local laws and regulations -- the brothers and their family propped the old patriarch's corpse up on their flatbed truck, his hand fixed in a vile gesture. They put vulgar signs around him, signs mocking the town fathers; and then they drove the truck through town, past the town hall and over to the selectmen's respective homes. If memory serves me well, I think they did that for more than just one day.

Sadly, I cannot remember the murder victim's name. It is almost too disgusting of a story to want to know more, or to remember further intimate details. But it is the kind of story one thinks can only happen once; it is the sort of evil one might expect to hear about in the backwaters of the world. It is surely NOT the kind of story one expects to hear about in Paris. But read this excerpt from Saturday's Wall Street Journal, a commentary by Matthew Kaminski†:

On Jan. 20 ... 23-year-old Ilan Halimi [a Frenchman] ... went for a rendezvous with a young woman he met at his store [he sold cellular phones] and fell right into the hands of his kidnappers. ... Ilan was whisked to the cité de la Pierre-plate, a large housing project in Bagneux, a Paris suburb (or banlieue). ... In an empty third-floor apartment and later a basement utility room, he was tortured. ... Several times ... the kidnappers called Ilan's family [Jewish] and read them verses of the Quran while their son screamed in agony in the background. ... After 25 days of torture ... [l]ast week, on a Monday morning, Ilan was found naked, handcuffed, with burns and bruises over 80% of his body, stumbling on train tracks in Sainte-Geneviéve-des-Bois*, south of Paris. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

[Kaminski's commentary is based on a WSJ report by Nidra Poller, listed as Today's Must Read in the Contratimes sidebar.]

Evil does not really have a religious face. Religion is about the obliteration of evil, not the propagation of it. While there is evidence that Mr. Halimi's death was not religiously or even ethnically motivated, too often such crimes are in fact so motivated. But the religious that would act thusly wear the black hood of their perverted religion over their heads: they are the executioner on the gallows. They are not warring for God, but against Him.

So too are the hillbilly sickos that once lived not that far from my home. How is it that such evil lurks in the hearts of men (and women)? How is it that humans have the capacity for such perversions; and how is it that we can become inured to them, even indifferent to them?

I do remember Ilan Halimi's name. It is a name I hope never to forget.

Peace to you, dear Ilan.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

†Excerpted from "Barbarians Inside the Gate;" Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal/The Weekend Journal, 2/25-6/06, page A10.
*It is interesting that Saint Geneviéve allegedly prophesied invasions and disasters for Paris.