YOUR PHONE RINGS IN THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING AND YOU WONDER, “who the hell is calling me at this hour of the morning?” You answer thinking it’s probably a wrong number. But it’s not a wrong number. It’s your ex-wife calling from Victoria to give you the worst news possible. Your daughter has been murdered, not just murdered, but brutally murdered. You collapse on the floor in despair, not believing what has just happened, trying to convince yourself you were in the middle of a bad dream. But you are not in a dream- the call was real. You pick yourself up off the floor, dial the number of a close friend and scream into the phone. Lindsay’s dead. Your friend calls another friend and together they race over to help. Not knowing what to expect when they get there but they are on their way.

NO PARENT EVER WANTS TO EXPERIENCE A CALL LIKE THAT.There is nothing more precious to us than our children and to have they taken from us through the act of violence is something few parents will ever fully recover from. It’s a trauma that will eat away at you for life. The rest of your life, every day, every waking moment. You can’t function, you can’t work, your anger is raging and the questions burning. Why my little girl, why Lindsay? Only 24 years old with her entire life in front of her, who would want her dead?

THE LOSS OF TRUST EATS AWAY AT YOU, the anger that never leaves your soul, the gut-wrenching pain no one can understand if they’ve never been in your shoes. Don’t judge a parent who has lost a child to a heinous murder. Don’t judge a parent for trying to find the answers. You may never understand their irrational behavior, their methods of trying to get to the truth, and the terrible way they treat people at times. Often they are not even aware of the pain they are causing others.

TRY TO FEEL THEIR PAIN, YOU CAN’T. Try to imagine those lost Christmas’s without your beautiful daughter’s smiling face looking at you from across the room. Try to imagine how you feel realizing you will never experience the smiling facing of the grandchildren Lindsay is not going to be able to give you. She would have made a wonderful loving mother but no one is going to see that now. She’ll never see her sister get married, never feel those hugs from her mom and dad again. And they will never hear their phone ring, knowing it’s their daughter on the other end calling to say hello.

TRY TO IMAGINE THE 14 YEARS OF HELL OF NOT KNOWING WHO DID THIS TO YOUR CHILD. Your gut tells you there is someone out there who knows who murdered your child. Imagine the gut-wrenching pain/anger your are feeling wanting so desperately to know who did this but no one is coming forward to confess. Imagine 14 years of waiting for arrests, 14 years to hear the police tell you they have just made arrests in the case. But it doesn’t happen, that call never comes. You know Lindsay is up there waiting but there’s nothing more that you can do other than what you’ve already been doing.

THE ANGER THIS FATHER FEELS TOWARDS LINDSAY’S BOYFRIEND JASON IS REAL. Lindsay was murdered and her boyfriend never reached out to help find her killers. You know he knows more than he is saying, but he’s not talking. He could take some of your pain away if he could just find it in his soul to do the right thing. You don’t know if he was involved in the crime, but if he wasn’t why won’t he talk to you? Why won’t he tell you what he knows? Is his mother covering for something he did? Is Jason covering for something his mother did? Somebody out there knows something but no ones talking.

SO IT’S 14 YEARS AFTER YOUR DAUGHTER’S BEEN BRUTALLY MURDERED AND YOU STILL HAVE NO ANSWERS. You’ve never let them break you, and you never gave up the fight for justice for Lindsay. You may be broke financially but your heart and soul will keep you going. You keep it together because you once said, “I’ll die trying” and so far you’ve followed through on that promise. Well here you are still kicking, and still fighting the good fight.

SHIRLEY’S LAWYER CAN HELP HER TAKE YOUR MONEY, but they can can never take away the love you have for your precious daughter. They can keep the secrets they hold about how and why Lindsay died, but it will never stop you from your relentless journey to get to the truth. The proof is in the pudding and the last few days the public has gone to great lengths to give this father their undying support. Look at the website “What the hell just happened in Victoria” and “Vibrant Victoria”. I think those two websites tell the story of how people feel about Lindsay’s dad being sued by Jason’s mother. That is a crime in itself. Shame on them!

 

JUSTICE FOR LINDSAY! May she rest in peace with the angels while her father continues his pursuit for justice.

 

HOMICIDE CRIME VICTIMIZATION AND GRIEF, TRAUMA AND POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

DUE TO THE MULTILAYERED INFLUENCES OF HOMICIDE CRIME, EVERYONE IS IMPACTED, whether it is direct or indirect through increased fear, a lost sense of security, the financial impact of crime on an individual or a community, higher health care costs, or the human costs to victims and their families. Survivors of homicide victims, who experienced complicated trauma and PTSD do not spontaneously recover without treatment. Unfortunately, many reported that they have never had access to any mental health treatment and sadly, they continue to deal with the intrusion of trauma in their day-to-day lives’ years later.

ANOTHER OUTCOME FROM HOMICIDE CRIME VICTIMIZATION IS THE DETERIORATION OF THE FAMILY STRUCTURE AND THE WEARING AWAY OF FINANCIAL STABILITY

due to interruptions in employment because of on-going physical and mental illness. Mistrust of social and justice institutions including access to mental health care services has led to an erosion of survivors’ belief in protection and fairness. Survivors of homicide victims, who experienced complicated trauma and PTSD do not spontaneously recover without treatment. Unfortunately, many reported that they have never had access to any mental health treatment and sadly, they continue to deal with the intrusion of trauma in their day-to-day lives’ years later.

GRIEF IS GENERALLY DEFINED AS A NATURAL RESPONSE TO LOSS.

It is the emotional suffering you feel when someone you love dies. Often, the pain of loss can feel overwhelming. You may experience all kinds of difficult and unexpected emotions, from shock or anger to disbelief, guilt, and profound sadness.

In certain circumstance, such as a homicide, people can experience an especially intense reaction. When this is the case, grief can be defined as the anguish experienced after a tragic loss of a loved one, which may include both physiological and psychological distress. This type of reaction can become life-threatening through disruption of the immune system, self-neglect, addiction and passive or active suicidal ideation.

IF WE LOOK AT SOME OF THE CORE PRINCIPLES ASSOCIATED WITH GRIEF, we realize that to be human means that loss will occur at some point, and that all people, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status will experience loss and grief, but few will experience loss and grief resulting from homicide. We assume that while people have an innate capacity to adapt to loss without generally needing any medical interventions, this becomes a misassumption when “homicide” is the manner of death that led to the loss.

As much as grief is a natural response to death, adaptive and non pathological in nature, a “homicide narrative” changes that assumption. Because of that, it is deeply concerning, that without a clear understanding of how grief and trauma are interconnected when dealing with homicide, the pathologizing of grief often serves to marginalize this population by creating labels, stereotypes, and barriers for those individuals to overcome.

ALTHOUGH GRIEF IS COMPLEX AND COMPLICATED BECAUSE PEOPLE AND RELATIONSHIPS ARE COMPLEXand complicated, survivors who were consulted on this question expressed frustration that many were diagnosed as having a “mental disorder,” when no such prehistory of a mental health condition existed prior to the homicide crime victimization.

EXPLORING THIS FURTHER, SURVIVORS OF HOMICIDE VICTIMS stated that during the early days when they were struggling to process grief and trauma, if accessibility to grief-informed and trauma-informed programs were made available to them, they strongly felt that complications leading to further negative health outcomes such as posttraumatic stress disorder or other mental health diagnoses, or addictions may have been averted.

Grief resulting from a homicide is interwoven in a sociocultural context, influenced by family, and interconnected with other social systems that are far reaching affecting all populations. Since grief does not occur in a vacuum, it should not be seen as solely an individual experience.

TRAUMA DEPENDING ON WHAT SOURCE IS QUOTED, can differ slightly, but all definitions are consistent in identifying trauma as the emotional response someone has to an extremely horrible event. Therefore, it is accurate to say that the outcome in the case of a homicide of a loved one, may go on to interfere with a survivor’s ability to live a normal life. Subsequent to that, is the correlation between the long-term effects of trauma that, if untreated, can morph into posttraumatic stress disorder.

http://canadianpomc.ca/resources/homicide-crime-victimization-and-grief-trauma-and-posttraumatic-stress-disorder/

 

PLEASE NOTE, this website is not affiliated in anyway with the site that Jeff Buziak runs nor does Jeff have any say in what is posted here. This blog is run independently and all responsibility for it’s content lies with the owners of the site.

 

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