Why Would He Do That?

I knew something was wrong the other night when I heard the helicopters circling overhead for hours. Then I saw the news as the story unfolded.

The surveillance video of the Greenwich Village shootings comes from a camera positioned just above the nursery school that Sweet M attended for three years.

It's hard to convey the sense of vulnerability and sadness that something like this evokes. Hard to think about the parents of the four men killed — two auxillary police officers, one an NYU student and the other an aspiring writer; the bartender at the pizzeria two blocks from here, and the gunman himself. Family members of the dead shooter said he'd been acting increasingly paranoid in the days before the shooting.

Yesterday Sweet M learned about the shootings in the neighborhood.

"Why would he do that?" she asked.

I said, "I don't know, honey."

"It's a mystery," she said.

"Yes, it's a mystery. He was probably very angry about something."

"You mean like he wanted a toy or something?"

"Well, probably not a toy. He probably wanted something else. And he probably had something wrong with his brain. He was probably crazy."

"You mean he was loco," she said.

She's been watching and reading Dora the Explorer. Who knew the vocabulary would extend to neighborhood shooting rampage?

May the victims of this shooting rest in peace, may their families abide in peace, and may our neighborhood recover some sense of peace.