20-year old girl I know in my hometown was abducted and murdered from the Tim Horton's she worked at last night. A co-worker kidnapped her and drove her downstate. Her body was found in her car about 150 miles south of here at about midnight. The co-worker was arrested in Bangor this morning and charged with murder and kidnapping.

Didn't know her well, but used to chat with her when I'd stop to get coffee and sandwiches. Sweet young woman. She's got relatives in my kids'
classes.

I've got to cover this story for my job.

When you live in a county that only has 75,000 people in it, you end up having some kind of connection to nearly every tragedy.

Looks like the killer was a 19-year old creepy/quiet who worked the nightshift with her. Vaguely remember him waiting on me a few times. Just the two employees in the store at the time. A customer called the cops when he couldn't find anyone to wait on him and figured something had happened.

I've had to cover about 30 murders in the past five years, even though this is one of the most rural counties in the country.

There is no escape from the violence in this country. I know of at least 8 people from my HS graduating class that are gone because of acts of violence.

Steve

There's no good spin on that one. I'm sorry.

You could go the route of more caustic message boards and say something like "People get fucking killed every day, stop your whining."

Which is why I rarely post personal things on any other boards, or at least not serious personal things.

Hipinion remains disgusting, eh?

One just adapts what one posts on other sites and has a different sort of fun.

I’m sorry to hear about this. I moved from L.A. to San Francisco in 1995. The biggest difference was how safe it always felt. The Murder rate in San Francisco for 2004 was something like 88. I remember thinking, when I first moved there, how different things were. 88 would be about a week in the big city but accounted for a full year up there.

Yeah I have really come to appreciate this place more than ever. I keep trying to find others that are good, and some are but our passion for music is never matched, IMO. I have given up on hip and I would rather post on ILX instead and do so. It’s been around for forever and kind of intimidating because it has a bunch of writers from various web sites and magazines (Pitchfork, Stylus, ect). Spoon if you need another outlet you might want to check that place out.

I think Obner should expand and become even better. I have an idea and will write it out in the next week, post and see if it is doable.

np: Dungen – Ta Det Lugnt (last album to hear in ‘04 and might crash my top 20 party)

Umm, Steve who is B. Kenobi?

Found out today the guy cornered the girl in the bathroom of the coffee shop and kicked her in the head repeatedly until she died.

She was a beautiful young woman.

The guy looked so ordinary in court today, like a scrawny Chad Michael Murray.

Brutal. It must have taken a few blow, at least, and some minutes, to perish from that assault. And to think, the perp probably revelled in it. He has NO conscience, NOR empathy, NOR any capacity for either.

Lock him up for life, no parole. No chance of parole.

He cannot be reformed.

Execute the bastard, although I don't think your state does that. Some people don't deserve to be here.

Prison(er) justice just might get him first.

He may not be a child molester, but I would think, behind the walls, this guy would be pretty low on the totem.

Maine has no death penalty, but it also has no parole for capital crimes.

A girl I graduated high school with and went to Michigan State just like me was kidnapped, raped and murdered on the second-to-last day of Christmas break our freshmen year.

She was home in Saginaw, went to the store one evening to get some taco shells and never came back. I remember the morning I had to head back college that the local radio station said police were looking for a young girl by her name who had disappeared the previous night. She had a common name and I hoped it was someone else - that feels weird, wishing bad luck on someone else so that no one you know is hurt - but my best friend called me back at school to tell me they had found her body. Turns out a couple thugs kidnapped her and then tried to blame each other for everything in court. Both were convicted.

She and I weren't good friends, but we'd stop and talk and catch up when we crossed paths at MSU. Great girl, smart, pretty and nice as could be. She was going to transfer back to the local college because she missed her family while away.

I got Semisonic's "Great Divide" that Christmas and listened to "Down In Flames" quite a few times as I headed back for the funeral. Those lyrics — "The plan was to burn up while the air was clear, we'd all wear our visors down/An arcwelder spark in the atmosphere, not this man-sized hole in the ground/Now your father's face is torn between anger and tears, your mother's hair's amazingly grey/And I am seeing these friends for the first time in years, it's icicle reunion day" — still get to me.

That event was huge news in my hometown for months. The following spring my friends and I organized a big benefit concert at our old high school and raised over $1,000 that we donated to a memorial scholarship her parents started. When something horrible like that happens, you just feel like you have to do SOMETHING good in response.

The young woman's grandmother works with my wife. The grandmother's probably going to take early retirement because the mother is a basket case right now.

If I remember right, the girl won some regional award for her paintings and poems when she was in high school.

Got me thinking about all the people I've known who have died badly. Murder, overdose, suicide, vehicle accidents, drownings, fires, etc.

Got past 100 and didn't want to think about it anymore.

If it did, there's no way that Red and Andy would have ended up on the beach in Mexico.

Rehabilitated? It's just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit.

Jesus H. Christ.

I'm glad you don't "know" me!

Obi-Wan (Ben) Kenobi

<-----Geek

The story was in the Boston Globe today.

Yeah, that's it. With all the murders in Massachusetts, you'd think it wouldn't be news in Boston.

But, the Globe and some other New England papers have decided Aroostook County is a freakhole since the church arsenic poisonings. That was the next town up.

Plus waiting on customers while she was dying is pretty fucked.

I'm 38 1/2 years old. Most people who have been around awhile could think of a hundred people they know who've died badly. I knew at least ten people who shot themselves, but that's over many years and not all were close friends. At least 20 people who died in car accidents. Two who drowned. One killed by lightning. Four who were shot by other people. Six who died in fires. One stabbed. And that doesn't count the stroke, cancer and heart attack victims that are part of most people's experiences
But I doubt I'm an anomaly. Bad things happen sometimes, in all lives.

Normally, when I don't know what to say, I don't say anything. But this begs for a reaction, and the only thing I can think of is: That's some pretty fucked up shit right there.

My condolences to you and anyone else who knew her.

It's too bad that he was competent at murder but incompetent at suicide. Pisses me off.

Maybe I am the anomaly.

But, I can think of (maybe) twelve deaths of people that were (remotely) close to me. With remotely, of course, excluding (for example) the two or three people who graced my campus at points simultaneous to my tenure there but whom I did not know a wit.

But, the list: two aunts (paternal) committed suicide, and one of those before I was forming any memories ('82, I think, when I was two); a grandmother (paternal) died from a stroke in '92; the youngest child (son) of my fourth-grade teacher died at twenty-four in an auto accident in Rhode Island the same year as I was in fourth-grade ('89-'90 school year); the neighbour in apt. 3 in the four-family building in which my brother, mother, and I lived in the late 80s-early 90s, and for whom I walked the dog (Ezekiel, a Scotch Terrier (I think)), died in early '90 at 88 (?); the male teacher who accompanied a group of high-schoolers, of which I was a part, to Mexico in summer '97 died in '99 from skin, liver, or bone cancer at 59 or 60; and the co-owner/manager of the custard-stand at which I worked from Jul '96 to May '97 died in '01 at 42 from a massive coronary in his sleep.

What is that, seven? Not a heck of a lot.

To even get to a dozen, I would have to include the wife of my seventh grade language arts teacher; my step-father's mother; and, and,... I cannot do it.

My mother, on the other hand... Though then again, she works in an ER, has for twelve or so years (at two different hospitals), and has been in hospitals as an RN since '77, so....

I had to look in the Local>Maine section to find it on the site but it was on the 2nd page of the City & Region paper edition of the Globe.

It sucks that there's people like this kid out there.