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The blues has come knocking at my door, dour-eyed and dressed up in its finest death suit, drenched in children's blood. I speak of the Revelus family tragedy, horror in Milton, Mass., this past weekend. We step into April, the month of foolish jokes and poetry, just in time to see a 5-year-old's head, severed from her body, rolling through a living nightmare to the slashed body of her 17-year-old sister, a budding poet. These girls go into the grave next to the brother that murdered them.
The Boston Herald has published a poem by 17-year-old victim Samantha Revelus, "Acquaintance." She would have recited it at Milton High School's poetry jam this Thursday night had she lived and admonished her listeners to respect a woman of color, treat her like a goddess, a lesson her brother never grasped. According to another story on the site, Samantha had not only brains but also beauty. The Huffington Post links to a story about Samantha's youngest sister with the headline "Bianca Revelus, Birthday Girl, Decapitated by Her Brother in Gruesome Rampage." Per the AP, "Five-year-old Bianca was killed as a cake for her birthday, which investigators believe was Friday, sat on the kitchen table."
Could we have done anything to prevent this tragedy?"
This story of carnage, Saturday's fatal domestic violence in Massachusetts, has me crying and nearly vomiting and I'm not alone. Schools are calling in counselors to explain and comfort students. The police officers who witnessed the scene have been put on administrative leave and sent to therapy because, God!--who can function after seeing what they saw, not on TV but right in front of their faces?
According to the video at Boston.com (link), Kerby Revelus, 23, got into a fistfight with a neighbor the day before he murdered his sisters (link), but other than that information, we may never know what sent him into a stabbing frenzy the next day. It's reported that he and his sister Samantha argued frequently. But what does that mean?
As he acted on his insanity, down in the family's basement a woman, the grandmother, went about ordinary chores, doing laundry, oblivious to hell unleashed on the home's second floor, that Samantha had dialed 911, that she'd passed the phone to the third sister in the home that day, 9-year-old Sarafina, before passing out and bleeding to death. The police entered the home and the first officer on the scene saw Kerby Revelus take little Bianca hostage. Wielding a kitchen knife, he slit her throat with so much rage, he beheaded the child. And then he went after Sarafina, attacking her with the knife. The police officers shot and killed him.
Reports indicate the family moved to the U.S.A. from Haiti about five years ago. The parents were at work when their son killed their daughters. The mother, arriving on the scene and being told of the killings, collapsed in the street, screaming. News sources say the 9-year-old daughter survived the knife attack and has returned home.
It sounds as though this is another case of a family not believing that bouts of uncontrolled rage is a condition not cured with a little extra loving, that you can't protect a disturbed soul to psychological health or treat mental illness as "just a phase" one grows out of the way I know many families do. It's common for families to ignore violent outbursts and to make excuses--"Oh, Bobby's just high-strung" or "Sue's wound a little tight, gets out of hand sometimes, but that's just her way."
The Revelus family killer, Kerby, had been violent before also. Another sister, Jessica, who was not home during his final fit of violence, called the police in 2004 after he punched her in the face. Later she refused to cooperate with prosecutors and see the case through. I don't know for sure, but I suspect she felt family pressure to drop the charges. In recent news reports, she's quoted as saying she wasn't really afraid of her brother, that he was just trying to be "big and bad" and she called the policed to show him he wasn't. Yet he was big and bad. He exhibited behavior that should have signaled
