episode two: dead girls

(spoiler alert: don't read this unless you've read chs. 1 &2)

People die in this town.

That's no suprise. People die everywhere. What I mean is, people die badly here in Orono, Maine. Only they aren't supposed to. We get maybe a dozen murders, tops, per year in the State of Maine. In a town like Orono murder can't possibly happen. So when it does it is met with denial.

Her name was Hannah. I didn't know her personally, but I was friends with people who did. Hannah "committed suicide" a few years back. Because the police decided immediately that she'd committed suicide, they never bothered to look for clues that might have proved otherwise:

Hannah was a happy person with lots of friends, and had never shown any signs of being suicidal.
She'd just bought Christmas presents for her family and friends, and was talking about how much she was looking forward to Christmas.
There was no suicide note.
There were no powder burns.
She'd just started dating a guy who, it turns out, was just out of jail.

When these facts were brought to the police they said, well, she was probably cleaning her gun and it went off. Problem is, Hannah's dad was a cop. Hannah grew up around guns and gun safety was something she was fanatic about. Even though she didn't have kids, she always kept a lock on her gun when she wasn't using it at the shooting range.

It hurts just to think about what it must have been like for her friends and family. To have lost someone they loved, and to know that most likely she was murdered, but that the police destroyed any evidence that might prove this. To have, instead, your loved one held up to public ridicule and scorn for being a suicide. To spend the rest of your life not knowing the truth. What do you do? How do you heal from that?

If you're in Orono, stop by the Bear Brew Pub. There's a plaque to Hannah at the left end of the bar. Pay your respects to Hannah. I wish I could give more testament to her life, but sadly, all I really know about is her death and how much it hurt her friends.

There was another incident just a couple years ago. A student killed herself by hanging herself from a tree near her dorm. All I have to go by on this one are rumors. Suicides rarely make the news because they are seen as so shameful, and they want to protect the family, supposedly. So this student killed herself, but something about it just didn't sit right to me. She'd just gotten off the phone with her boyfriend and was going down to meet him. Again, there was no suicide note. Again, from what I hear, she was a happy person who showed no signs of being suicidal. And we're supposed to believe that in the short walk to meet her boyfriend her life suddenly turned so tragic that she spontaneously hung herself?

Just another teenage suicide. The police didn't bother to look for any other clues. I'm not sure it even made the papers, so the dead girl never even had a name. It happened in the fall. The University instituted an October Break policy years ago. AKA the Suicide Break because so many students killed themselves during that time period.

But this is a quiet town, and bad things like murder are things that only happen in other towns.