This is not a happy story that I have to tell tonight. Over the weekend, a 16-year old girl was murdered in Randolph, NJ - about 20 minutes from where I live and just a couple of miles from where I used to live in Mendham.
The girl, Jennifer Parks, apparently went over to her next-door neighbor's house (Jonathan Zarate, age 18, who is charged with her murder) to watch television in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Zarate supposedly got angry and for some reason beat the girl both with his hands and with a blunt object, then stabbed her multiple times until she was dead. It is believed she was also asphyxiated in some way, but not sexually assaulted. Then, to dispose of her body, he cut off her legs at the knees to stuff her in a steamer trunk. With the help of his younger brother (age 14) and another teenage boy (age 16, I think), Zarate put the steamer trunk in his father's Jeep for a day, and then the three boys attempted to dump the trunk off a bridge over the Passaic River in Secaucus, NJ on Sunday. A policeman saw the car and the boys before they did this, and arrested all three of them when he discovered what was in the trunk.
While there are still obviously a lot of unanswered questions here - what was she doing going over to the neighbor's house at 2am in the morning to watch TV, and where were all the parents while all of this was going on - and I'm sure the media will be jumping all over this in the weeks to come, the question I want to send out into the ether is:
Why are young men so ANGRY these days?
I have more questions than answers tonight. What happened to teaching young people about impulse control? How to manage your anger? The value of a human life? That life isn't disposable, as is often shown in the movies? That you are responsible for your actions and you DO reap what you sow in this life - so no matter how angry you are at another person, and no matter whether you think your anger is justified, if you take the life of another, you really never get away with it no matter what you do.
People who commit murder and try to hide what they've done almost NEVER succeed. They are nearly always caught, sooner or later. But even if they are not caught or brought to justice (ahem... O.J. comes to mind), on some level they carry with them the consequences of their own choices. Whether you want to call it karma or something else, to me it just makes sense that when a person puts out that level of angry energy as would need to exist for a murder to occur, then that person carries that angry energy around with them and one way or another, its going to poison everything they do from that point on.
We are products of our choices. I wish more angry young men would recognize that and simply walk away from a situation before it goes too far, because once they cross that line, there is no going back - and not only have they taken a life, but they've ruined their own life and the lives of people who care about them as well.
If you are reading this tonight, send your prayers and healing energies to the family and friends of Jennifer Parks, and to the families of these three boys - because they must be suffering in their own way. None of them deserve what they are going through right now.
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Follow-up, June 8, 2006
The Morris County paper, the Daily Record, had as its front page headline today: Judge: Try teen as adult in slaying. James Zarate, the then-14/now-15 year old brother of Jonathan Zarate, will be tried as an adult in the murder last July 30th of Jennifer Parks. Apparently there is evidence to suggest that James did more than just help his brother try to dispose of the trunk in which they placed Jennifer's dismembered body; he also "schemed with his older brother to stab, beat and mutilate" the 16-year old victim. The article says that James had a propensity for violence since the 5th grade, that he had been bullying Jennifer in school and that he damaged her mother's car by throwing rocks. At the time of the murder he was no longer living in at his father's home in Randolph but was living with his mother in another town, but he was visiting his family in Randolph on the weekend of the murder. His older brother Jonathan was a high-school dropout.
Initially, James (and another 16-year old friend) were only to be charged with helping the older brother to dump the trunk into the Passaic River, but that same 16-year old "friend" told police "that the brothers told him that they poltted to kill Parks by tricking her into going next door to their father's house at around 2 a.m on July 30. The friend said the brothers confided that they separately inflicted wounds on the victim and then shared the gruesome task of each cutting off one of her legs."
So again, I'm forced to ask the same question as in the title of this post: Why ARE young men so angry these days? This is beyond anger, though... this is completely barbaric behavior. I think this judge is doing the right thing trying the younger brother as an adult. This was not an act of temporary insanity or an argument between teenagers gone awry.
