Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Homicidal Vengeance

People can be so unaccountably stupid, so unbelievably embroiled in their emotions, so psychically frail, so despairingly uncaring about others that they dishearteningly and without a second thought, take the lives of others in pursuit of giving up their own. We're familiar with terrorist suicide-bombers who dedicate themselves to giving up their lives while taking as many other lives as possible, in pursuit of an ideological or religious agenda.

But a man whose female companion has informed him that she cannot contemplate living with him any longer for any number of reasons - all of which are personal and private, and which the man would be well acquainted with - harbouring such a hideous and unrelenting grudge that he chooses a very particular type of death, demonstrates a formidable lack of conscience.

Committing suicide, taking his own life to take himself out of his misery of self-pity wouldn't do it. It might be painful to the woman he wants to destroy, but not enough. On the other hand, taking the child they shared, and murdering the child while committing himself to purgatory would inflict endless anguish. And wait, there's more: in the process, if he also targeted other innocent lives he would leave that ungrateful woman utterly stricken.

What might her life then be valued for, knowing that her decision to remove him from her life cost her her child, and also cost another mother the life of her two, innocent, completely-unrelated-to-the-situation sons? Such a deep and soul-destructive aura of guilt might be assumed to settle over the psyche of a woman who never could imagine such an outcome.

So 39-year-old Denis Philippon, grieving for the loss of his relationship, of a woman he was to marry and with whom he had a child, decided he would teach her a lesson she would never be able to live with in peace and mental serenity. He would careen his vehicle with himself and his four-year-old child inside, into another one, thus committing suicide.

Obviously, that he would also be placing other, innocent lives in danger was of no concern to this self-centred, ego-driven man set for revenge. In the first dreadful collision the result was the death of two young men, but Denis Philippon and his child survived. Wresting his wife's vehicle from her as she desperately followed his own, he crashed into yet another vehicle.

This time succeeding in removing his child, and himself from the land of the living. This is not the picture of a human being who loved another; his love was for himself only. His actions were those of a psychopath with no empathy for others. His death is no tragedy.

What he engineered in mounting his death was a colossal, needless tragedy.

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