Eight Dead in Ohio
High Street runs right down the middle of Columbus. It has a trendily renaissanced arts district. It runs past The Ohio State University. It is the center of a vibrant gay community. It has some rough stretches. It has some homey stretches. It has some “suburb-within-the-city-limits” places. It’s my favorite street in town, and also out of town. As US-23, it can take me north to Toledo, and to Ann Arbor where resides that “Team Up North” that as a Buckeye fan and a former Notre Dame student I abhor with double fervor. It goes up to Flint, even, then hugs Lake Huron before ending at the Mackinac Bridge. But I use it most to head south, to play the slots at Scioto Downs, or to just take a nice drive down to Portsmouth, on the mighty Ohio, and beyond into Kentucky. I could take it, eventually, to Jacksonville, FL.
But before you reach Portsmouth, you pass through Piketon, an hour south of where I sit, named for the same Pike as Pike’s Peak. It’s a depressed rural town like 10,000 others in America, with one major advantage: it’s poised for growth thanks to the very latest in uranium enrichment technology and the successful gas centrifuge proof-of-concept plant that is supposed to expand its operations. That will help, because about 1/3 of Piketon is below the poverty line.
Last week, Piketon became infamous as the site of the murders of 8 members of the Rhoden family across 4 different homesteads. The family members were killed methodically, some in their beds, possibly asleep, even, while 3 infants and toddlers were spared, by a person or persons still unknown.
I don’t know what this is yet. Nobody seems to know. Today a few marijuana grow sites were linked to the homes, but whether that was some sort of motive, no one can yet say.
What I do know is this: in 1959, the Clutter family was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas under similarly mysterious circumstances. America was shocked, and then was not allowed to forget, as author Truman Capote, by virtue of his glorious writing and his larger-than-life persona turned it into a macabre form of entertainment.
The Rhodens of Piketon are the 21st Century Clutters, ramped up to 8 killings over 4 sites due to inflation. The inflation of guns. The inflation of coldness. The inflation of a country pathologically loving and hating itself to death. On the same day this broke, there was another mass shooting in Georgia. In the last week, since last Monday, 23 people have been killed in mass shootings. Nearly double that – 44 – have been injured in the same shootings.
Forget “Right to Life.” They’re getting rich selling “Right to Death.”
The Piketon murders are the monster grown from the demon child that Capote midwifed on that Kansas prairie. Why are we arming this ravenous beast?
Capote’s novel, “In Cold Blood”, made those murders almost too personal and made me cry for days. He forced readers to see the humanity and inhumanity of all those involved.
1Allowing families to sue the gun and ammo manufacturers seems to be the only way around the stink of the second amendment. Driving them into unprofitability and possibly out of ‘business as usual’ might be the only way we can save our neighbors’ lives. This plague of murder and mayhem is terrorism, American style.
Well done, Cuz.
2But, but, but…don’t cha know the answer is that this family didn’t have any guns to shoot back with? Good guys, etc.
3The whole country has gone crazy. I can’t see the end.
As always, well done, Primo.
Until there is no profit in arms sales, this will be with us. I can’t say Capote’s writing & Harper Lee’s research [and searching interviews] had that emotional effect on me; after all – I read it at the age of 15 & before a career in the combat arms of the US Army.
I can echo the sentiments of others here that the use of weapons against our fellow man is barbarous. It’s bad enough to have to use them appropriately in defense of our country and rights as well as the liberties that are abused by criminals — but to use weapons in violation of others’ right to assembly, speech or commerce and to then invoke the 2nd Amendment to continue to sell weapons that have no other use than crime or war is evil incarnate.
Primo – I stand with you in revulsion of this carnage and others. I also am supremely jealous of your eloquence and passion. You do good with each essay.
4Jane, our son and I sleep very well in our remote rural area. Not in the comfort of our cold steel guns, but in the knowledge that our furry ranchies would sound the alarm discouraging any visitors that don’t know them. Our loyal ranchies sound the alarm with sufficient notice to shower, dress, have a snack and wait for intruders long departed, or more sanely return to bed.
Guns serve many purposes. Protection isn’t one of them. We can predict what the NRA will be saying about “if only there had been guns in the 4 Rhoden homes.” There might not have been guns in their homes, but probably there were guns being it’s a farm setting.
58 dead in O-hi-o,
8 dead in O-hi-o.
With apologies to Neil Young, the plaintive wail of his song was the first thing to come to mind, in addition to the photo. You know the one. The young Kent state woman is kneeling over her slain friend, arms thrown out. I feel like I can hear her cry, “Why? Why did you kill him?!”
Now there are more Ohioans echoing her words. Why? Why?
6If this tragedy IS linked to marijuana, it’s just one more argument for legalization. Take out the massive profits, Wild West and gangs — and people won’t kill over it any more than they kill over cigarettes.
And guns. Guns. That’s all. Just guns. The American branch of the human race is absolutely insane.
7smh
Also, too still yet an angry 2 year old toddler got mom’s purse off the counter and managed to off himself with her handgun and a 16 year old school girl was videotaped being beaten to death in the school’s bathroom.
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
8We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in O-HI-O. (thanks for the reminder,Debbo)
Being from Detroit, Boyne City and last home Elkhart, class 59, I remember all this as quite shocking.
9At this point in time, I’m not too surprised by these shootings as Indiana in the 1920s had the largest membership in the revised KKK and there still are many there as members/sympathizers; eg, Osceola a few years ago had a big KKK powwow on a klan leader’s farm where in they wanted to get a permit to march down the main drag. This made the national news. IMO, I think there ain’t no difference between Ohio and Indiana. Also, wasn’t there a town in south Ohio that got some bad publicity regarding HS football practices a couple of years ago?
You have a nose for this. Please keep us updated where the msm isn’t likely to.
I lived 10 miles from Notre Dame but, having gone to Purdue and IU, not much reverence there or Ohio:)
May 4, 1970. The 4 unarmed students killed at Kent State by the National Guard called out by Richard Nixon:
Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder. Two were protesting the expansion of the VietNam War into Cambodia and two were walking to class. Neil Young’s song and this picture memorialized the needless deaths.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/65/Kent_State_massacre.jpg
10The sad thing is that we know both the cause and the cure. Yet, we are afraid to do it. We are told not to politicize death. Exactly when is the right time to bring this up? The rest of the world has almost universally figured this out. This is where I differ with the keen minds of the party. They routinely prattle on about how we aren’t coming for your gun. Since I don’t hold office and don’t plan to I’ll say exactly what I’m thinking. “You’re darn tootin that I coming for guns and I won’t stop until I get every darn one.”
11The drug angle is currently being pursued. Pike County is indeed one of the poorest in Ohio, with two entwined consequences: one is that many people are growing dirtweed as a cash crop, the other is that none of that cash goes into county taxes, hence an underfunded county law enforcement and justice system. This in a backroad-laced area tucked between the Allegheny foothills and the Ohio floodplain. I mentioned US-23, well I-75 runs roughly the same route; I-71 and I-77 are other major north-south arteries within spitting distance as is I-70 running east-west. In Piketon, your crop is 10 hours from 2/3 of the US population.
This family had one indoor and two outdoor growing areas; the crop is said to have a street value in excess of half a million.
This would explain why Attorney Flying Monkey General Mike DeWine has been standing on phonebooks near microphones this whole time. Rumors of (gasp!) Mexican drug cartels run rampant.
12We sure are lucky that ISIS doesn’t live in Ohio. Just think of the terrible things they’d do.
13PE, I remember DeWine when he was in D.C. Too bad he couldn’t get anyone to carry around phone books for him then. He reminded in stature only of Patsy Mink and Dennis Kucinich. I recall Patsy standing on a crate to speak into a microphone at an ERA gathering one hot day years ago. Until then I never realized that I (the shrimp in my family) was taller than her. I had heard her speak before and always envisioned a giant. Not so much with DeWine.
14Primo! –
The only new business start-up in that area [legit, that is] since 2000 that I can remember is the winery at Ripley. Used to be some of these people could run across the river to work in Kentucky – inasmuchas they were better edu-ma-cated then we. But alas & alak, the timber jobs in Ky went the way of machine clear-cutting, instead of the horse/mule teams that dominated southeastern Ohio.
Yours in spirit,
15Anomalous
Access to weapons of war should be limited to those who are enlisted. Period.
16The metaphor of the last paragraph is bizarre. The killers will have heard of neither Truman Capote nor “In Cold Blood”.
17Hiked Tar Hollow State Forest near Piketon. Locals talked about uranium processing and the cancer that goes with it. Depressing.
During a trip in the Hocking Hills (not too far away from Tar Hollow), we encountered two strange things: 1) in a field, the owner had mowed giant KKK letters; 2) along the same road, we saw a substantial wrought iron entrance gate with the words, “Go Away” centered on the arch.
To say the least, these Ohio counties do seem a bit strange.
18It’s a common cartel tactic to kill you and your family but not young children. I suspect that competition is not allowed in cannabis growing.
Legalize it and watch the cartels switch back to heroin. Unless, of course, they were dealing heroin also.
Lotta sharks in them waters.
19