Polio said he allowed officers to release Bishop on the day of the shooting because the lead investigator, Captain Theodore Buker, told him she was too emotional to interview.
This part of this business has been bothering me. If this were a 21-year-old man, would the police send him home for over a week to get over his emotionality?
What, for that matter, did Buker mean by too emotional? If a suspect in a murder is emotional — I’m sure they often are — you bring in a psychiatrist to talk to them for awhile I guess… I don’t know. I’m not a policewoman. But you don’t send them home so they can work on their story. You keep them at the station and you talk to them when they calm down.
If they don’t calm down, you tell them they can stay in a cell until they calm down so that you can talk to them.
“If you eliminated everyone from an interview that was emotionally upset after a shooting death, you’d have no one to talk to,’’ [Norfolk DA William R.] Keating said.
***************************************
You don’t say to the 21-year-old man Oh! I see your mom’s here. Why don’t you go home with her? Do you? But you say it to the 21-year-old woman?
***************************************
Also find myself thinking about Bishop’s parents. What’s up with them? They’ve known, I guess, for decades, that their daughter is mentally ill. They’ve known she killed their son, possibly intentionally. They must have suspected she was involved in the bomb plot. There were probably other things.
What was their thinking in (perhaps) covering up the murder of her brother? That rather than lose both their children — one to murder, the other to prison — they would try to hold on to one of them, try to treat her illness… ?
But think of living with the murderer of your son!
February 16th, 2010 at 6:52PM
The shooting death of the brother may or may not have
been “a family affair” i.e. quarrels between the father,
the mother, Amy takes it seriously… perhaps the brother
intervened…. just what scenario I won’t try to specify.
Police officers know all too much about these situations.
February 16th, 2010 at 6:58PM
well, think about the Nancy Kerrigan current family situation…
meets Ted Kaczynski
domestic violence is complicated- and it is more complicated by being called domestic violence
to me violence is violence
work place issues meet family issues and vice versa
along with a strange brew of mental illness stirred in for good measure
February 16th, 2010 at 7:06PM
j – Precisely because domestic violence is like that, you don’t exactly want to let everybody go home. You need to try to clarify the situation as quickly as possible – before family members have a chance to get together and agree on a story. Which looks like what might have happened here.
February 16th, 2010 at 7:12PM
You are absolutely correct and I agree entirely. Whatever
happened, the lack of investigation and immediate release
was inexcusable.
February 16th, 2010 at 8:11PM
it is also about race
would they let a latina or a black woman use this excuse
and certainly if the shooter was a black man…
i guess i am, in turn, a little bothered over your being bothered — but i guess it has to do with a different “frame of reference”
February 16th, 2010 at 9:03PM
are her parents even alive now?
did they run afoul of her wrath in later years? if they have both died, it would be worth making sure they died naturally.
February 17th, 2010 at 12:03PM
They were thinking that it wasn’t anybody else’s business, and no mere public authority was going to take their only other offspring away. Additionally, they were thinking (quite correctly) that they had the money and the power to ensure that the lackeys who otherwise might have prosecuted their daughter could be kept in line.
They were thinking that the whole messy business of their son’s death was embarrassing, and the less said about it the better. They were thinking exactly the way their charming daughter thinks: My kids can’t eat ice cream, so everyone else has to bite it. So to speak.
Unfortunately, in this case, “biting it” meant lethal assaults.
Yes, the parents are alive. Bishop’s children spend summers with them. This should ensure that any sociopathic tendencies are cultivated well into the next generation.