Murder trial: building anger

*Author’s note: This post includes information that might be upsetting to some readers.

Day four. Autopsies.

The morning’s testimony was easy. Members of a Michigan State Police dive team paraded in and out of the witness chair, dressed in neat suits and ties as they described plodding through chest-deep Alpena rivers with metal detectors, searching for gun pieces in the murk at their feet.

Then came the afternoon. The room rustled as a white-haired forensic pathologist with a dry sense of humor raised her right hand and promised to tell the truth.

When someone’s about to describe a murdered girl buried eight feet deep for eight weeks, you don’t necessarily want them to tell the truth. You don’t want to hear about strangulation marks and bruises from head to toe. You don’t want to know about burned skin preserved in the refrigerated coolness of the earth.

The judge warned trial spectators several times that the prosecutor was going to display graphic photos they might find upsetting. It was OK to leave, he told them.

Nobody did.

The prosecutor took the jury through a dozen, maybe 15 photos, splayed on the large-screen TV at the front of the courtroom. The photos depicted the naked body of a beautiful 17-year-old who, in her final months at least, lived as a meth addict, uncontrolled and fierce.

On the autopsy table, she became fragile, innocent, a child.

One doesn’t know what to expect to feel, viewing a real, not-sensational-TV-show human body that’s been through what Brynn’s body went through.

Police say her killer sat or kneeled on the girl’s chest and strangled her until she died. They say the alleged killer and an accomplice dug a hole, put Brynn’s body inside, and set it on fire before covering it with dirt and a cement slab.

The photos showed signs of that abuse, and of the passage of time before she was found.

As the photos progressed around Brynn’s body, one woman, then another, got up and left, hands pressed against their mouths. Someone else reached for a tissue.

Most of us, though, sat and looked. The photos made us sad, perhaps. Angry, yes. But we could look at this horrible sight and absorb it and move on.

I feel terrible even saying that. It feels so inhumane, so inhuman. I’m tempted to blame the fake violence that’s everywhere, inuring us to the real thing. But I don’t think that’s really it. Something else kept our eyes on the awful pictures on the TV screen.

When the prosecution called in another forensic pathologist, this time to talk about the autopsy of 31-year-old Abby, two people left after the judge’s warning. The woman sitting in front of me, a friend of Abby’s, took a deep breath, steeling herself.

Abby lived longer than Brynn, spending most of her life in tough environments from which she had little chance of escape. She ran with the wrong crowd, as they say ― maybe by choice, and maybe because she didn’t see any alternative.

Police found her at the base of a tree not quite three weeks after she was killed with a bullet. Any bruises in her upper body were gone, carried away by insects. 

Autopsy photos showed closeups of Abby’s colorful, elaborate tattoos, including the vibrant monarch butterfly on her ankle. Then they jumped to a closeup of the black, obscene hole in the back of her skull, black fractures radiating out from it like lightning.

The photos flipped to the fuzz-topped boots Abby wore the day she died. Her zip-up hooded sweatshirt. The elastic hair tie she wore around her wrist.

The photos make her real. Even if they are heartrendingly awful.

Maybe that’s why we could look at those photos. Because we need those murdered people to be real. Even if that meant seeing them in that horrible way.

Rural areas like Northeast Michigan might not be rampant with murder. But people get killed in those places all the time. Killed by the drugs merrily carted there by traffickers with a keen eye for an easy market. Killed by depression and desperation when those drugs, or other traps of hopelessness, convince them to raise their hands against themselves. Killed when they become someone that the people who love and need them no longer recognize because of the damned substances we cannot subdue.

It all makes me so angry. Those bodies in the photos make me furious. My fury, for the moment, has nowhere to go but into my keyboard, and a fat lot of good that does. But, as I was just telling my friend Katie, maybe if we all get mad at the same time, something happens. Something. I don’t know what. I don’t know what the fix is. But we need to be mad, damn it. People are killing our kids and imprisoning our adults and it’s absolutely not OK.

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Insert deep breath here.

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From the comments I’ve received after the last few posts, I think this topic is hitting some of you like it’s hitting me. I’ve asked in the past that, if you think someone you know might appreciate this blog, you share it with them. This time, I have a different ask.

I am not an online marketer. I am not socially savvy. I don’t know how to expand my little bloggy tirades out into the big, wide world. And I certainly don’t see myself as anyone particularly worth listening to. But I think other people are feeling what I’m feeling. And they might want to get mad with me.

If you know someone impacted by the crappy stuff of the world, someone who is aching from a loved one lost to addiction, who is upset about the factors that led to Brynn and Abby's deaths or who is just fed up with people being hurt, please consider sending them a link to this blog. I want to hear from them. I want to connect with people longing to figure out how we can do better.

Thanks.

For the record, when I said “it’s absolutely not OK” above, I really wanted to type a swear word instead of absolutely, but I couldn’t do it. I already swore enough to make my husband uncomfortable, and I thought I’d better not make it worse. Sorry, honey.

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My dippy blog email address is juliemarshmallows@gmail.com. Write any time.