The story behind the story of the murder-suicide in Lake Peekskill is emerging as another textbook case of a man coming undone and taking his family into the abyss with him. Could anything have been done to stop his free fall? Could his workplace or relatives have intervened sooner? Just how many fairies dance atop the head of a straight pin? The questions and answers are beyond comprehension, even though this is all-too familiar and painful terrain.
Steven Lessard ordinarily attracted little notice from co-workers at the Indian Point nuclear power plants, where he worked since 1995, first as an outside contractor and then as an employee. The emerging story yesterday was that something went noticeably awry Thursday; there was a flat tire and Lessard became "inordinately concerned about getting the car fixed," is how Entergy Nuclear Northeast spokesman Jim Steets put it. He "was clearly having difficulty with relatively minor issues."
To the credit of Indian Point - a place where you really want co-workers to notice the ordinary as well as the out-of-sorts - other workers noted Lessard's state, informed a supervisor and steps were taken to get Lessard help; of course, those efforts, better than most could probably expect on their non-nuclear power plant jobs, were tragically insufficient. Lessard, 51, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, killed his wife Kathy, 48, and their daughter, 14-year-old Linda, before taking his own life. Their bodies were found by police in the home on Maple Road, this after worried relatives asked for help.
"The mother was a sweetheart. She always did things for the kids at school," Debbie Weeks-Petranchik, a Putnam Valley Middle School PTA official, told LoHud.com. "He was very quiet and polite. There was nothing you would have said, 'Hmm.' They were just an average family."
And now part of a continuing riddle - one that doesn't begin to take shape until all the violent headlines are strung together. According to the Violence Policy Center, which claims the most comprehensive data on the subject, more than 10 murder-suicides occur in the U.S. each week, accounting for some 591 deaths in the first six months of 2005, an estimated 1,182 for the year. Other studies place the yearly toll as high as 1,500 deaths. They come one after the other and in a steady stream.
The murderers are almost always male - 94 percent of the time. The most common scenario: an "intimate partner" murder-suicide wherein a woman is the murder victim, the reality in 96 percent of the cases. When women are the killers, they "tend to kill their children and themselves . . . Men, on the other hand, tend to kill their children, themselves and their intimate partners as well." Preferred weapon of choice is hardly surprising: a firearm, 94 percent of the time. "Every major murder-suicide study ever conducted has shown that a firearm - with its unmatched combination of lethality and availability - is the weapon most often used."
What to do? Fixing boys and men would help. The center calls for better domestic-violence programs and laws, including "programs that assist men with coping with issues of control and separation." And it should be plain as day that fewer guns - though not a factor in the Lake Peekskill deaths -would mean fewer dead women and children, and fewer male murderers. Not much of a riddle, really; we just pretend that some of the answers are so elusive.
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