"Shadow of a Doubt (A Complex Kid)"
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
from Damn the Torpedoes
1979
Part II
Let's see, I've somehow found myself stuck in the quagmire of writing about long-ago crimes in my neighborhood. I'm not sure this is necessarily something I need to be doing on this blog, ostensibly a website for music recommendations and movie discussions. But I've committed, and once I commit to something, I'm gonna see it through. Wouldn't be surprised if the real reason I started writing about the Eddie Polec murder gets pushed to tomorrow. You can check out Part I here, though.
I backloaded a lot of these Song of the Day entries, and so I could afford to take a bit of a break, and now it's been like a week and a half since I wrote Part I, and in that time, I've had some opportunity to reflect on how complex all this shit is. Surprisingly so, I'd argue, since "teen murder" is not supposed to be complicated. It's supposed to be simple. Killing children is wrong, end of story. And that's true here. I'm not arguing the contrary. I have no will or desire or no reason, certainly, to argue the contrary. I didn't even know the fucking kid and yet I feel this case very deeply. I hope today instead to just paint some of the complicated details around the margins, that's all.
The first undercurrent that you have to remember—always, when it comes to any bullshit that happens in suburbia-type outskirts of the city like Fox Chase—is racism. There were many reasons that this incident made headlines, but it's my opinion that it blew up in the specific way that it did because of race. I can't find pictures of any of the convicted parties currently, but I know for certain that at least three or four of the seven ultimately convicted were POC. Would a Black child beaten to death on the steps of a Cobbs Creek church garner the same type of coverage? Hard to say, but probably not.
Let's see, I've somehow found myself stuck in the quagmire of writing about long-ago crimes in my neighborhood. I'm not sure this is necessarily something I need to be doing on this blog, ostensibly a website for music recommendations and movie discussions. But I've committed, and once I commit to something, I'm gonna see it through. Wouldn't be surprised if the real reason I started writing about the Eddie Polec murder gets pushed to tomorrow. You can check out Part I here, though.
I backloaded a lot of these Song of the Day entries, and so I could afford to take a bit of a break, and now it's been like a week and a half since I wrote Part I, and in that time, I've had some opportunity to reflect on how complex all this shit is. Surprisingly so, I'd argue, since "teen murder" is not supposed to be complicated. It's supposed to be simple. Killing children is wrong, end of story. And that's true here. I'm not arguing the contrary. I have no will or desire or no reason, certainly, to argue the contrary. I didn't even know the fucking kid and yet I feel this case very deeply. I hope today instead to just paint some of the complicated details around the margins, that's all.
The first undercurrent that you have to remember—always, when it comes to any bullshit that happens in suburbia-type outskirts of the city like Fox Chase—is racism. There were many reasons that this incident made headlines, but it's my opinion that it blew up in the specific way that it did because of race. I can't find pictures of any of the convicted parties currently, but I know for certain that at least three or four of the seven ultimately convicted were POC. Would a Black child beaten to death on the steps of a Cobbs Creek church garner the same type of coverage? Hard to say, but probably not.
Not only that, but the incident was reversal of how society typically views the city/suburbs split. I am speaking anecdotally here, but the white people in my neck of the woods would typically think "the crime in the suburbs is perpetuated by minorities from the city." That's not empirically true, but I'm speaking about racism here, and racism requires no data to back it up. But in Eddie Polec's case, this was suburban minorities coming from the suburbs and coming to the city and beating to death a white city kid. So this allowed Northeast Philadelphia racists to simultaneously confirm their racism (the color of the murderers) and be confounded by it (the suburbs are supposed to be "safe"). One of the more salacious incidents that spawned from the murder was the Daily News making a headline "MURDER HIGH" in reference to Abington High School, where a lot of the perpetrators were from.
So I was thinking about race, but I was also thinking about the justice system in general, and how kinda fucked it is sometimes. Fucked, and also: complicated, twisted, backward, or, at the very least, just a little off. I find it fascinating and also more than a bit horrifying that the police were very upfront about the fact that the people who were arrested and charged were basically arbitrary picks on their part. Not that the people convicted weren't guilty, but that there were most likely OTHER kids who were not arrested, just simply based on the fact that more arrests would've made it "too complicated" for the police. They said this! I'm not making this up! And I'm not even denying that that's true. But I also don't understand what's fair about seven kids being arrested and others being able to escape consequence.
So I was thinking about race, but I was also thinking about the justice system in general, and how kinda fucked it is sometimes. Fucked, and also: complicated, twisted, backward, or, at the very least, just a little off. I find it fascinating and also more than a bit horrifying that the police were very upfront about the fact that the people who were arrested and charged were basically arbitrary picks on their part. Not that the people convicted weren't guilty, but that there were most likely OTHER kids who were not arrested, just simply based on the fact that more arrests would've made it "too complicated" for the police. They said this! I'm not making this up! And I'm not even denying that that's true. But I also don't understand what's fair about seven kids being arrested and others being able to escape consequence.
So you'll excuse me if I don't really take the police all that seriously, okay? Like, it doesn't really sit right with me that the police, after initial interviews with witnesses and those possibly involved, claimed that the kids from the suburbs (i.e. the "killers" and their associates) were "cold" and "seemed like they didn't care." That may have been true for some, but it might have also been true for others that they didn't trust the police to handle this appropriately, and were exercising their right to remain silent. The subjective description of kids provided by the police seems so off to me. I understand why they said what they said, but it makes me feel uneasy.
Also makes me feel uneasy that the person who plead guilty and received a lesser sentence in exchange for providing testimony, Kevin Convey, was the grandson of a retired Philly cop. Too much of this seems arbitrary, I dunno. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, I'm not saying that Convey deserved more or less jailtime, I'm not saying that he did or didn't do the right thing by testifying to the crimes that he and his friends committed. I'm just saying that, if the police are making arbitrary decisions throughout the life of this case, then it makes me feel weird that the arbitrary decision to choose one of the many alleged perpetrators of this case to turn into a star witness just happened to be related to a fucking cop. That any leniency on the part of the prosecutors toward Convey had everything to do with the civil status of his grandfather.
Now that's all something that makes me queasy in a hypothetical way, but this other thing hit home for me in a personal way. This isn't something that you're gonna read about on the Wikipedia page. It's in the book, but it's underplayed in a way that's always seemed off-putting to me. Here you go: Eddie Polec was drinking at a keg party at Fox Chase Rec before he was murdered. If you know me at all, then you'll know that I, of all fucking people, would never, fucking ever judge someone for this act. And if anyone had judged Polec for underage drinking in the aftermath of this death, it would have been the most infuriating part of this whole fucking debacle to me, you can count on it.
Also makes me feel uneasy that the person who plead guilty and received a lesser sentence in exchange for providing testimony, Kevin Convey, was the grandson of a retired Philly cop. Too much of this seems arbitrary, I dunno. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, I'm not saying that Convey deserved more or less jailtime, I'm not saying that he did or didn't do the right thing by testifying to the crimes that he and his friends committed. I'm just saying that, if the police are making arbitrary decisions throughout the life of this case, then it makes me feel weird that the arbitrary decision to choose one of the many alleged perpetrators of this case to turn into a star witness just happened to be related to a fucking cop. That any leniency on the part of the prosecutors toward Convey had everything to do with the civil status of his grandfather.
Now that's all something that makes me queasy in a hypothetical way, but this other thing hit home for me in a personal way. This isn't something that you're gonna read about on the Wikipedia page. It's in the book, but it's underplayed in a way that's always seemed off-putting to me. Here you go: Eddie Polec was drinking at a keg party at Fox Chase Rec before he was murdered. If you know me at all, then you'll know that I, of all fucking people, would never, fucking ever judge someone for this act. And if anyone had judged Polec for underage drinking in the aftermath of this death, it would have been the most infuriating part of this whole fucking debacle to me, you can count on it.
But that of course wasn't the case. I do remember a brief interlude in the book (it's been a while, sorry) in which Eddie's dad was anxiously awaiting the post-mortem and praying that it didn't show any significant BAC level (it didn't). He was anxious about it, not because he was worried his son had been drinking, but because he knew a 0.03 BAC could be used as ammo for the defense in court. Pretty sure the defense used it anyway, but that didn't move the needle at all. And why should it? Just some kids fucking around at the local park, as it always has been and always will be.
What I'm offering now is the question about, well, if that's the case, if it's NOT that big of a deal, if there are in fact more important things in this world then whether kids are drinking in the woods, then why was I given so much shit about it? Especially blocks away from where Polec himself was drinking? Everyone bends over backwards to say that Eddie Polec was a stand-out kid, beloved by everyone, and I believe in my heart that that is true. I really do. But it hurts, too, that I found myself attempting to follow this kid's footsteps in a few different ways, and was usually belittled for it. I don't understand how a cop can say that this crime was especially heinous because Eddie Polec was a good kid and then call me a piece of shit for doing the same thing but having the audacity not to be beaten to death immediately afterward?
I'm not passing judgment on the victim here, I hope that's been made clear (despite my shitty, desperate writing). I'm passing judgment on many of the people who reacted to this incident. I think a lot of what happened in the wake of the death fucking stinks like shit. Is any of it worse than a kid getting murdered? Of course not. That act of violence is shockingly simple, and there's nothing else to say about it. But everything that happened afterward involves complexities that I have trouble thinking about and questions that I'll never be able to answer. It's an indictment on the society that we live in, not the people involved, necessarily.
All that comes back into play when there's a new development in 2025, but we'll get to that tomorrow.
Postscript: I had no idea how to fit this into the above blog post, but I also didn't want to leave it hanging, because it's something that's been bothering me for a bit, and I think I finally figured it out.
Okay, so one of the many pieces of mythopoeia sprouting from the Eddie Polec case has to do with the 911 dispatch stuff, which we touched on yesterday, and which I purposefully avoided today, even though my own training in that very same 911 dispatch room eighteen years later was complicated to process (I just don't like to talk about my employment history too much on this public blog).
I'm not passing judgment on the victim here, I hope that's been made clear (despite my shitty, desperate writing). I'm passing judgment on many of the people who reacted to this incident. I think a lot of what happened in the wake of the death fucking stinks like shit. Is any of it worse than a kid getting murdered? Of course not. That act of violence is shockingly simple, and there's nothing else to say about it. But everything that happened afterward involves complexities that I have trouble thinking about and questions that I'll never be able to answer. It's an indictment on the society that we live in, not the people involved, necessarily.
All that comes back into play when there's a new development in 2025, but we'll get to that tomorrow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Postscript: I had no idea how to fit this into the above blog post, but I also didn't want to leave it hanging, because it's something that's been bothering me for a bit, and I think I finally figured it out.
Okay, so one of the many pieces of mythopoeia sprouting from the Eddie Polec case has to do with the 911 dispatch stuff, which we touched on yesterday, and which I purposefully avoided today, even though my own training in that very same 911 dispatch room eighteen years later was complicated to process (I just don't like to talk about my employment history too much on this public blog).
In the book, there's obviously a lot about the grief of the Polec family, and how that grief was compounded by the excessive news media coverage of the incident and the ensuing trial and all the other bullshit like the 911 controversy. The authors of the book state that it was especially harrowing to see Saturday Night Live take a crack at the 911 stuff by having guest star Roseanne Barr playing a cranky 911 calltaker. Because of its mention in the book, the skit is then mentioned on the Wikipedia page, citing the book as its reference.
Here's the thing: I can't find an SNL skit about 911 dispatchers online anywhere. You can look at lists to see which episode had which guest hosts, and Roseanne hosted an episode on December 3, 1994, so the timeline matches up. And if you search for Roseanne skits online, you can find a grainy video of one from that episode in which she plays a calltaker. Except, she's working for a credit card company. No mention of Philadelphia or police or murder or anything like that.
So what's going on here? This is my theory. When you're grieving, you see evidence of your grief everywhere. If you're grieving the death of your son, and that death happened to involve some atrocious injustice involving a specific civil service, then you're going to see references to that injustice everywhere. You might be up late on a Saturday night, unable to sleep, and pop on the TV, and see some asshole on some shitty "comedy" show with the headset on, taking phone calls, and you might think, not unreasonably, "oh my god, she's referencing my dead son."
And then you remember it a couple years later when you're being interviewed about it for a book, and the author who asks the question isn't going to fact check that minute detail because it's an interesting take, and it supports the thesis, and so it makes it into the book unquestioned. And that book becomes a reference, and that reference makes it fact. Even though the fact was just a misinterpretation through a haze of grief.
And then you remember it a couple years later when you're being interviewed about it for a book, and the author who asks the question isn't going to fact check that minute detail because it's an interesting take, and it supports the thesis, and so it makes it into the book unquestioned. And that book becomes a reference, and that reference makes it fact. Even though the fact was just a misinterpretation through a haze of grief.
Either that or I'm looking at the wrong SNL skit. I actually wouldn't put it past those fucking ghouls to have two separate calltaker skits in the same episode. I don't have the courage to watch an entire episode of SNL, so we're gonna have to end this blog post here.
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