August 30, 2007

• Around Here Now, and Right Here and Now

  Right now, around here in Alaska and farther afield, law enforcement authorities — local, state, and federal — are looking for Joshua Wade.  Before I ever heard of either Joshua Wade or Della Brown, I had been following for years the news stories of dozens of unsolved disappearances and murders of Alaska Native women, most of whom had moved from the remote villages of their birth for the educational and economic opportunities in Anchorage, and had gotten lost in the street life of alcohol and homelessness.

  Della Brown was one of them,

  a 33-year-old Native woman whose abused and
  mutilated body was discovered in an abandoned shed on Sept. 2, 2000.
  Brown may have been sexually assaulted after her death; her skull was
  so pulverized the coroner compared her head to a “bag of ice”; her hair
  had either been cut or torn out; and burnt matches littered the shed’s
  floor near her body. For several days after Brown’s murder,
  unsympathetic gawkers paraded through the shed, lighting matches in
  order to view her battered remains. None called for help.  source:  Indian Country Today
  

  The testimony of several of Joshua Wade’s friends, who said that he had led them to Della’s body in that shed, showing it off and boasting to them of having killed her, was not enough to convict him of her murder when he was tried in 2003 on charges of murder, rape and evidence tampering.

  The jury found Wade guilty of evidence tampering but acquitted him of
  all other charges. He was eventually sentenced to five years, plus 18
  months for a parole violation in an earlier conviction. Since he had
  remained in jail from his arrest in 2000 to his acquittal in 2003, he
  was released in December 2004.  source:  Anchorage Daily News

  On August 3 of this year, Joshua Wade’s next door neighbor, Mindy Schloss (photo), was last seen by acquaintances.  Maybe some of those who love her are holding out hope that she is still alive, but the cops are assuming she is dead.  They are hoping that someone will speak up and lead them to her body. 

  Earlier this month, they released to the media a security photo from a bank, showing someone making a withdrawal with her ATM card.  Somebody recognized Joshua Wade, and a search of his apartment turned up the clothing worn in the security photo and a receipt for the withdrawal.  Wade, at last report, was still in the wind.

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  Here and now, in my personal life, time passes, not much gets done, a lot of things that need to be done go undone, and in spite of it all I’m happy more than otherwise.  Life, no matter how difficult to sustain and endure, beats the alternative.  There’s no need to go into detail, to check off the symptoms du jour from the M.E. list.  On the ability and severity scale, I guess I’m about 35%.  That’s energetic enough to feel restless, but not enough to do much about it.

  The sky was pretty this morning, so I walked across the street and shot a few pictures.  They will be showing up in my photoblog whenever I get them processed and uploaded.

  

  • 3:22 pm
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