Recently a woman was murdered on a subway. She was set on fire by her attacker. This is an unimaginably cruel act and a horrible way to die. But the abuse doesn’t stop there. The 57-year-old victim’s name was Debrina Kawam. Her tragic ending deserves to be left here in peace as there is nothing we can say or do to bring her back or relieve the pain of those who knew her. But this posting is about the exploiters of her tragedy which to this Project is a uniquely self-indulgent form of criminality.

The perpetrator was reportedly an undocumented migrant who was in the country illegally. For those who seek to spread fear and hatred he has been suddenly adopted as the new representative of the population of immigrant and migrant workers. Any sense this heinous act is reflective of any population, race, ethnicity or history or even is statistically significant in terms of crime trends in the general US population is ludicrous. To smear a community of people by purposefully misrepresenting the demographics of this singularly vicious crime is a crime not so different than a hate crime. The motivation to exploit this woman’s death for personal or group gain is often a shameful political device in which people who could care less who she was, use her and her death for their own gain. This writer recently encountered a string of hate messages on Facebook forwarded by a supposedly responsible influencer regarding this incident which incidentally appeared under a photograph of a very young, white, possibly AI generated teenage girl; a false image for the purpose of building rage. Some of those messages I read in this posting were directed at the sitting president suggesting he was directly responsible for her death and deserved to experience her kind of death. The string of comments was too long, obscene and discouraging to complete reading. This kind of stone cold ignorance and manipulation of reality is very dangerous although in many instances the perpetrators of this secondary violence already know they are sacrificing truth for acceptance and gain.

Occasionally one hears; “Don’t worry, all is good”. Often I smile and nod my head to the well meaning, but in truth, all is not good. Some things are so-not-good they are evil. This last category of ‘not good’ includes the conscious exploitation of tragedy for personal or political gain. Good starts when we give crime victims their dignity back and protect the good families and American workers, immigrant, migrant, and otherwise whose often times strenuous lives have just been made that much more difficult by heedless, heartless bad actors exploiting tragedy. How about a new year’s resolution to tell the truth for the whole of 2025? The impact on our society would be radical.