True Stories

I just rode my bike by a house that has the entire neighborhood talking. I’ve never seen the owner, but people tell me he’s middle-aged and looks normal enough. Apparently, he only emerges at night to work under lights in the yard, which has exploded with the aftermath of his nocturnal frenzies, mysterious projects hastily begun and abandoned. The town has officially deemed his property blighted, but I am convinced what we are seeing is evidence of a man unraveling.

I had decided to sit here and write about this house and my suspicions that this guy is spiraling when I was distracted by a story in The New York Times about a sheriff’s-deputy-turned-minister who put a man on death row for killing his two-year-old daughter, who was found unresponsive after falling out of bed and later died. The sheriff-now-minister also noted the father’s lack of emotion at the hospital when his daughter was on life support, and later, when he was on trial. Expert witnesses testified about shaken child syndrome and everything seemed to fit, so the father was convicted and sentenced to death. Twenty-two years later, he’s still on death row. What the sheriff-now-minister and jurors didn’t know then was that the man is autistic, and his little girl had a variety of serious medical issues from birth that could have resulted in her death.

Curious, that in the space of morning I was shown two examples, first and second-hand, highlighting the same lesson: speculation makes for compelling storytelling, but truth exists independently, even if we’ll never know it, and that it’s the only thing that actually matters.