A Personal Note About Assassination and Murder
Defined: The act of assassinating; a killing by treacherous violence.
Hillary Clinton’s remarks hit me in a place too close to home. Not only from a political standpoint, but from a personal standpoint. Those who know me, know that I don’t look forward to Memorial Day weekend, because my grandfather, my father’s father, was murdered in downtown Los Angeles close to Union Station on Memorial Day weekend, 1971.
To this day, we’re not 100% certain of who actually did it, though LAPD closed the case and tied it to a black guy on a rampage (presumably over drugs, though that isn’t known for sure because the archived files were destroyed. In a murder case, go figure.) The problem with the LAPD theory is that their file was incredibly thin, so thin, in fact, that they could not put the man on trial for my grandfather’s murder. He was convicted on the murders of two others, one of which had an eyewitness.
My grandfather was shot once on the right side of his neck at point-blank range, and once on the left side at point-blank range, then stuffed into the trunk of his car and left for the police to discover 3 days later.
Assassination usually applies to political killings. My grandfather was simply murdered. Whatever verb is used, it is an ugly, horrible memory. Invoking that on Memorial Day weekend sent shivers up my spine.
I generally crawl into my own self on Memorial Day and come out the day after. The only difference this year is that I’m inclined to do it a couple of days early.
If she were standing in front of me with that self-righteous shake of the head, I’d have to suppress the urge to slap her, while asking what exactly she meant through clenched teeth.
There are some things never forgotten. I don’t need an ambitious, cynical candidate to magnify them. If that’s how I feel, how much more must it have stung the Kennedys and those who lived through that horrible night when RFK was assassinated in LA? And why the dig at California?
The sooner she crawls back under her rock, the better.
On this 37th year of the murder of Charles G. Hayes, we all still remember.
