True Crime, the Endless Circle of Mourning and My Late Friend

As readers of this blog are well aware, I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts. A LOT. Thankfully, there’s no chance whatsoever that passively consuming hours upon hours of entertainment every day about murder, death and evil will have a negative impact on my fragile psyche and paralyzing depression. 

It’s just healthy, is what it is. 

Because I listen to so many true crime podcasts I sometimes find myself wondering how I would be characterized if I were to end up the subject of one of these shows, either as a victim or as a murderer. 

I’d like to think that I would be described as a loving family man and involved father who doted on his wife, children and dog as well as an author of note. 

The podcasters would probably mention that I worked for the entertainment side of The Onion for nearly twenty years, that I had written a series of books about and with “Weird Al” Yankovic, that I self-identified as a Juggalo and Phish fan, and had written a book about the fandoms of both groups. 

The podcast would prominently mention that I coined the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It might even make it into the episode title. 

The podcast would probably also accurately describe me as coming from a troubled background, not having a relationship with my biological mother and having serious financial and mental health struggles that I wrote about openly in my books and my website. 

The victims in true crime podcasts tend to be summed up in one of two ways. They’re either sinners or they’re saints, with precious little in between. 

They’re either consummate mensches who would do anything for anyone and give you the shirt off their back or they’re troubled souls whose complicated lives played a role in their violent deaths. 

Those questions recently became a whole lot less theoretical because one of my friends was killed in a mass shooting. 

Her name was Amy St. Pierre. She was a wonderful person and it feels strange and awful and inconceivable to be writing her in the past tense, just as it is strange and awful and inconceivable that she is gone.

I was not super close with Amy but I thought the world of her. She was smart and kind and beautiful and accomplished. She had the wonderful quality of making people feel important, valued and seen.

To her I wasn’t just the painfully awkward husband of someone in her social circle; I was a writer whose books she pre-ordered and writing she followed. It made me feel special that someone who was so impressive not only remembered me but actively supported me in a very real, concrete way. 

I can’t imagine anyone having anything negative to say about Amy. Her last name was fitting because she really was a saintly person who devoted her life to her husband and her children and her friends and her job at the CDC. 

She was a bright light in the lives of everyone who knew her, just a good, good person whose presence single-handedly made the world a better place. The world is consequently a lesser place for her absence. 

Amy’s death has hit me hard because it’s so senseless and wrong. My brain cannot make sense of it because it is fundamentally senseless. There’s no reason at all that Amy should be gone forever because our country cares more about guns than it does about the people killed by them. 

Amy St. Pierre

That’s the horrible, horrible thing about a mass shooting like the one that took Amy’s life. Mass shootings don’t just affect the person taken too soon, or their partner, or their immediate family. They affect everyone the slain knew and loved and connected with. 

Because Amy’s otherwise blessed life touched so many people in such a positive way her death is similarly having a devastating effect on a large group of people. 

These senseless deaths create a circle of pain and grief and mourning that stretches out far and wide and includes friends and acquaintances and coworkers in addition to fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. 

My friend’s death gave me a new, deeper hatred of Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists who try to convince a gullible public that the people killed in mass shootings are just crisis actors pretending to die for the sake of taking away guns and implementing martial law. 

These people aren’t actors. They’re not performers. They’re people like my friend Amy St. Pierre and they deserve to be honored with honest words of love and appreciation but also with concrete action to ensure that tragedies like this stop happening so often and with such terrible, far-reaching consequences.