(Berrien County Court Bailiffs Joseph Zangaro (L) and Ron Kienzle. Both had previous service as sworn police officers and had worked at the Courthouse for a decade. Photo Jason Heeres/Twitter).

I was moving the cars late yesterday afternoon. The saving grace was that I had remembered to forget that the crew from the Brother Asphalt company were coming the next day to re-seal the west side of the parking lot and put bright new white stripes to mark the spaces.

I had unloaded the Panzer after returning from the farm, and neglected to put it back in the basement garage- ditto with the Police Cruiser, which unfortunately has to live out there in the elements.

I moved the Cruiser first, after spying a vacant space on the street above our lot, vacated by one of the day-parkers from the National Guard Bureau at Arlington Hall Station. I listen to NPR on the radio to ensure I have fair and balanced coverage, and there was some person talking about important local issues, I forget which ones, the Metro nightmare, maybe, and when I limped back down the steps to mount the Mercedes and drive it around to the garage entrance, I heard the Breaking News guy on the satellite radio talking about another shooting.

This one was at the Berrien County Courthouse, in prosperous St. Joseph, Michigan, located across . The story seemed to be that two Bailiff’s in the courthouse had been murdered by an inmate who had grabbed someone’s weapon. Another officer of the court had been shot, not critically, and other people injured. The gunman himself was in turn shot dead by responding police.

That was all I got in the way of coverage in the brief time it took to get the car bedded down in the proper place. I was pins and needles to see what the rest of the story might have been, and did not have a chance to investigate the matter more fully until after I got my swim out of the way.

The mild vertigo I have been experiencing was troubling enough that I decided to eschew the ritual Monday happy hour over at the Front Page, and it took some searching to find the name of the inmate who had gone on the deadly rampage. Based on what has been happening, I thought the incident would provoke a civil disturbance in Benton Harbor, the bedraggled neighbor of St. Joe, which has an average annual income of $17,500 a year. They had riots there in 1966 and 2003, so there is precedent for the residents to take matters to the street if they get provoked.

St. Joe is mostly white, and prosperous. With what happened in Dallas, I was prepared to hear about more trouble. Continued research indicated that the dead were Joseph Zangaro, 61, and Ron Kienzle, 63. They both had retired earlier from other law enforcement agencies and then served more than a decade each as bailiffs, according to Berrien County officials. A third officer, James Atterbury, 41, was shot but is expected to recover.

I am not going to mention the name of the shooter, nor display his picture. But he was conspicuous by his lack of diversity, just another desperate scumbag who was reportedly facing multiple felony charges. He attacked one of the bailiff’s escorting him to an arraignment upstairs, wrestled the gun away from one of the officers, shooting him in the process, killed Zangaro and Kienzle, shot a woman in a hallway, and was attempting to take hostages when he was gunned down.

Having unraveled the puzzle, I was relieved. Benton Harbor was not going to burn. No high profile national figures were going to visit St. Joe, no Department of Justice task force is going to sweep down and analyze the Department or the community, and there was no role for a spirited call to ban weapons.

And that is the way things are these days. Curious, isn’t it, when a story does not meet the requirements of the compelling narrative. This, it turns out, is just a senseless act of violence, and hence not that important.

I don’t agree with it, but that is the way things appear to be. For my part, I want to say that I care. The lives of officers Zangaro and Kienzle matter to me. All of them matter.

All of them.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com