Member-only story
Oh The (Digital) Stories We Tell Ourselves
A few years ago, a small girl was caught in a war zone with bombs exploding all around her. Her six-year-old fingers grapsed tightly to the assault rifle she had been given for her own protection. Her heart raced, the sweat made it difficult for her to keep hold of her weapon. She looked left and saw the fear in her seven-year-old brother’s eyes as he grasped his weapon as well. She looked right and saw her mother’s sweat dripping down her forehead. The sweat was real. The fear was real. The war was not.
This girl was the daughter of a meth addict who had believed, and who had made her daughter believe, for several weeks that they were at war. They locked themselves in their house. Every sound they heard, the mother explained, was another bomb going off. They were in real danger of being utterly destroyed at any minute. Finally, the mother told her children they needed to make a run for it. She armed them with rifles and tried to escape the “war zone” by fleeing their Northern Colorado apartment complex, sending “defensive” shots out into other apartments to defend against “the other side.”
This is a true story of a case I helped prosecute as a DA. The sweat was real. The fear was real. The gunshots were real. The story was not. But the children believed it.
