10:00am | With criminal sentencing for the murder of Melody Ross complete, Tuesday’s rejection of the wrongful-death claim brought by Melody’s parents against the Long Beach Unified School District would seem to be the end of the legal chapter in this terribly sad story.
It often happens in the wake of tragedies such as Melody’s killing that such a chapter is far longer than it should be, with survivors bringing civil suits against any possible party, whether or not there is any reasonable basis to do so.
I won’t pretend to know if that’s what happened here, but immediately upon hearing of the claim against the LBUSD, Sam Che, Melody’s uncle, publicly apologized for her parents’ action. “I don’t believe in what they’re doing and I hope they change their mind,” he told the Long Beach Post at the time. “I just want to speak my heart and apologize for why my sister did this. […] To me it was a slap in the face to the people that were standing behind our family. If [Melody’s mother] wants things to change at the schools, okay, let’s go talk to the schools. Let’s go talk to the City. But to sue them? What’s the point? Just to get money? I’m just hurt and shocked and a little bitter. […] The school has already endured so much, the City, the community.”
Days later the Long Beach Post received a press release from the attorneys handling the wrongful-death claims. From that release:
Following Melody’s death, security measures were in fact increased at all high school football games in the district. Handheld metal detectors, bag searches and additional security were part of the additional security measures taken after Melody’s death.
While Melody’s parents were pleased by the school district’s increased security measures, they wish it was done sooner and not as an afterthought in the face of their daughter’s death. Melody’s parents say they want the school to take responsibility for failing to provide adequate security so something like this doesn’t happen again. “We don’t want another family to lose a daughter or a son because the school was trying to save money instead of keeping our kids safe. We don’t want other parents to go through this kind of pain,” said Mr. Ross. “I trusted the school to protect my daughter and they didn’t. If I thought the school had done enough to keep our children safe, then my husband and I wouldn’t be pursuing a claim,” said Mrs. Ross.
Nowhere does the press release mention the culpability of the City of Long Beach, which the Rosses also sued. That claim, which listed everything from inadequate police training to inadequate street lighting as “substantial factor[s]” in Melody’s death, was dismissed last November.
Perhaps both Long Beach and its school district really do deserve some of the blame for Melody’s death (though I have no reason to believe so); but when you read in the complaint the description of Melody as “a 16-year-old honor roll student,” you quickly get a sense that these lawsuits may have had more to do with missing a tragically stolen loved one than who is actually to blame for that loss. Because while how well Melody did in school was something of which to be proud, it doesn’t have the slightest thing to do with whether the City and/or district bear any responsibility for her murder.
In 1995, attorney Johnnie Cochran, Jr. — famed primarily for his successful criminal defense of O.J. Simpson — filed a civil suit on behalf of over 250 relatives of persons killed in the car-bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The suit was not against Timothy McVeigh, the individual who built, planted, and detonated the bomb; nor against Terry Nichols, the individual who purchased the fertilizer for the bomb; it was against ICI Explosives U.S.A., Inc., the company responsible for creating and selling the ammonium nitrate fertilizer McVeigh used to create his bomb.
At the time when I heard about this lawsuit, I didn’t know anything about ammonium nitrate fertilizer (which I now understand to be one of the best and least expensive ways to provide nitrogenic nourishment to crops, and which won’t explode unless you add a hydrocarbon (e.g., petroleum) and a detonation source1), but my feeling was that the suit was more about lawyerly greed and/or survivorly pain than about third-party negligence. A federal judge apparently felt the same way and tossed the suit out before it went to trial.
It is misguided (if not ludicrous) to talk of exacting justice for a crime like murder. Justice can be found in a wage dispute, since a judge can force a crooked employer to pay back-wages owed plus penalties, thus (to use the legal vernacular) making the plaintiff whole.
But no such wholeness can ever be given to the loved ones of a murder victim. The life sentence given to Melody’s murderer is not justice. No penalty, not even the death penalty, would bring justice. There cannot be justice here. And perhaps that means there can be no peace for her loved ones, at least not now, a mere three years since that promising young girl was randomly gunned down.
The phenomenon of what we humans do when confronted with an irremediable cause of suffering, a hole we cannot fill, is central in the art/science of psychology. Sometimes a woman may become addicted to (e.g.) shopping because her father left home when she was a little girl. She orders daily from QVC, neurotically attempting to fill the father-void with handbags and hairclips because the one thing that could have done the job is forever unobtainable.
When in May 2010 the Long Beach Post ran our stories on the suit filed against the LBUSD, the vast majority of the 200+ reader comments we received ranged from dismay to anger that the Rosses were attempting to profit from Melody’s death. Few seemed to allow for the possibility that even if the claim were bogus, it may not really have had anything to do with money.
In response to our piece yesterday on the suit’s dismissal, the first two comments we received seemed to pick up where the aforementioned comments left off. “Too [b]ad […] that her family tried to cash in because of it,” says the first. “It is […] tragic the family attempted to profit from their daughter’s death at the expense of all of us,” says the second.
But the third, from “annie g,” is more sympathetic: “What a horrible thing to say about a family who suffered a great loss,” she says, referencing the preceding comments. “Wrongful death lawsuits are a reasonable way to try to compensate this family for their horrific loss, or the law wouldn’t allow them.”
While disagreeing with annie g’s implication that everything the law allows is reasonable, I think she’s hit on something — though it may have little to do with reasonableness. A wrongful-death lawsuit is reasonable only if there is good reason to believe the defendant named in that suit contributed to the death in question. But our grief — both its cause and our reactions to it — can be quite unreasonable.
I do not know if the Rosses now-dismissed lawsuits were reasonable. But whatever the case, I suspect they had something to do with searching for justice where none can ever be found, desiring a wholeness that will never come to pass, trying to fill a hole that nothing on this Earth can fill.
It is the nature of our beastly grief sometimes to impel us to unreasonableness; and actions we take in response to that unreasonableness may sometimes exact a cost on the innocent — persons, school districts, cities, et al. In such cases, a tragedy is made that much more tragic.
When such an unfortunate chain of events comes to pass, all we can do is move along it, then beyond. Lingering anger and resentment betters no one. Peace should be wished not only for the dear departed, but also for the rest of us still in this world. All of us.