{"id":92,"date":"2011-01-14T15:42:58","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T15:42:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/?p=92"},"modified":"2017-02-20T22:55:09","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T22:55:09","slug":"the-numbered-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/14\/the-numbered-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"The Numbered Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our local weekly newspaper, the Gazette<\/a>, ran a list last week that I find oddly fascinating — a list of all the homicides in Montgomery County, Maryland in 2010.<\/p>\n

There were seventeen, which isn’t bad for a county of just under a million people — neighboring Prince George’s County had more than five times as many, and as for Washington and Baltimore, well…<\/p>\n

Of the seventeen victims, fourteen were men, three were women, and none, thank heavens, were children. Ages ranged from 18 to 52, but the distribution wasn’t remotely even — twelve of them were under thirty.<\/p>\n

Nine of them were shot. Four were stabbed. The other four, including two of the women, died of “bodily trauma,” apparently meaning they were beaten to death. (The third woman was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors.)<\/p>\n

Of the seventeen, one shooting was ruled self-defense, one was deemed an accident (the killer apparently called the cops himself), and the other deaths all appear to be murder, though in some cases that’s not definite. In seven of the fifteen apparent murders, the killers are in custody; in two, the police have a suspect but have not yet put together a strong enough case for a murder charge. In one, the killer is known but at large, and that one’s a bit weird — it was one of the bodily trauma cases, and the 28-year-old suspect is described as 3’11” and 85 pounds. Gotta be a story there.<\/p>\n

One thing I find interesting is that in the seven (or eight, if you count the midget) solved murders, at least four involved multiple killers — twelve people have been charged in those four cases.<\/p>\n

And most of them were really stupid.<\/p>\n

I don’t have any brilliant conclusions, I’m afraid, except to say that looking over these cases, most of them don’t look much like the murders that Hollywood depicts every week on TV. One of them, a 19-year-old girl found in a shallow grave in the woods, might fit reasonably well on “Bones,” but it’s unsolved.<\/p>\n

Which is too bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our local weekly newspaper, the Gazette, ran a list last week that I find oddly fascinating — a list of all the homicides in Montgomery County, Maryland in 2010. There were seventeen, which isn’t bad for a county of just under a million people — neighboring Prince George’s County had more than five times as… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":821,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}