Mass murders in your hometown

My hometown is Samson, Alabama, a small city in the southeast part of the state known as the Wiregrass (pronounced "Wargrass" if you're a native), just a few miles from the Florida line. I actually grew up on a family farm about 10 miles from that, but went to school in Samson, and we did most of our business in the town. The population is roughly 2,000, give or take a few. It used to have three red lights, but a few years ago, the central red light was made a caution light. It's a Mayberry of a town. Not that it's perfect, like the fictional home of Andy Taylor, but everybody knows everybody else, everybody is related to everybody else, and nothing much happens other than raising kids, farming, going to football games, and church. Put it this way: Samson is located in Geneva County, which is still dry. If you want to buy alcohol, you go south to cross the Florida line.

I never thought my hometown would make international news, unless some real-life Jed Clampett struck oil or something, and I was fine with that. I now live just south of Jefferson County, Alabama, which has about 1.5 million residents in the metro Birmingham area, and which was in line to become the largest civic bankruptcy in U.S. history until bankruptcies became the hot new fad. The mayor has been justifiably lampooned for acts I'd call buffoonish if that weren't so unfair to perfectly reasonable buffoons everywhere. So international recognition isn't always a good thing.

But my hometown is all over the news for the events of the past afternoon. A 28-year-old resident of the town began a killing rampage in neighboring Kinston (which, at roughly 600 residents, is even tinier than Samson), where he killed his mother, his girlfriend, and his mother's four dogs for good measure, then set fire to the house. Then he drove to Samson, where he killed nine more. Four members of his family were his first targets, then others became targets of opportunity. One woman, whom I marched with in the Samson Tiger Band many years ago, was shot dead when she stepped out of a convenience store there. (Update: Evidently, this isn't the case. The victim had the same name as the woman I knew, but was not the woman I knew.)

(Update: Evidently the news that the victim was too young to be the woman I knew was incorrect. She was in fact the woman I knew. Sorry for the confusion, but as you can imagine, information is still being solidified, so corrections are inevitable.)

The maniac then left Samson and continued on Highway 52 to Geneva, the county seat. According to reports, he was sufficiently armed to kill many more at Reliable Metal Products, a company he had once worked for, but law enforcement officials intervened, and the maniac took his own life without killing anyone else.

One of the law enforcement officials involved in stopping the maniac found out later that his wife and 18-month-old daughter were killed by the maniac, and that his four-month-old had been shot but is expected to live. You can read one of hundreds of full writeups here.

I'm not trying to make dramatic hay out of this tragedy. It's not like I lost close family members or lifelong friends or anything like that. But 11 people murdered in two towns with a total population of 2,600 is just unfathomable. Highway 52 is also Samson's Main Street, and it was shut down yesterday for all the crime scenes. How do the residents deal with that? I once had a car wreck at an intersection near my house, and from that time until the time I moved away, I couldn't drive through that intersection without flinching. How can Samson residents drive down Main Street without remembering what happened there? I graduated with the mayor of the town, who I'm sure never dreamed he'd have to handle a situation like this when he ran for office.

So there's no pithy closer, no flippant remark, no "the rest of the story" to today's blogging. Just pray for the people of Geneva County.