The Randomness of Tragedy; This is What Happened....

How did Sully "save" flight 549? Ask People Magazine, because we so clearly need a workaday hero in these unsure times. Sully is surely savvy enough to remain humble so that as the cycle wanes he will fade graciously. We eat our heroes as surely as we look for blame.
I was shocked in the days after the next crash, flight 3407, to read comments on the internets such as "Sully would have brought that plane home safely;" as if he is some sort of a god who could melt ice on wings with the power of thought. Maybe Tom Cruise can now that he has achieved superhero status in his church. Lets just let Sully write the book and get over it. Its time to move on to the next baby in a well.

If only the good thoughts of the superheros among us stopped the daily tragedies that come, maybe not more often these days, but with more clarity as we age and the real lack of a sense of reason sets in. Oh, I suppose that there is religion for guidance, and some purpose written on those walls and leaves by some early man struggling to make sense of the same fire pit that we all sit around ultimately, but to me, there is something much more stark, terrifying, and logical about the cycle of things with beginnings and ends, less the magic of living forever, and more as a cog in an ever turning wheel of this universe becoming whatever it will. The rest is just ego manifested to make the journey possible and even tolerable.

So one day; a day just like any other, as a human being and as a mother, I've come up against something that is just intolerable to me emotionally, physically, and logically. It defies explanation or reason...and its just plain cruel.Its not like shit doesn't happen every day, and its not like I don't have tragedy in my own backyard, with children losing both parents in short course, and 9-11 widows heading to heaven to be with their dead spouses via said plane crash, not to mention Chimps on the rampage, but a tragedy has touched me this week that involves someone young and new, though once removed from my direct life, who had promise and talent... and it gives me pause in the senselessness of all things...shaking the delicate order as if we lived in an ant colony, burying our dead...


On February 15th Gabriella Camejo, 22 years old and the daughter of the significant other of my father, Suzanne Camejo, was mowed down in Baltimore while returning from a night out with a friend. She was a student at the art institute there, and had just returned from a winter break trip home to see her mother, my father, and her friends. The pictures in this post are from that trip and a trip last summer (and belong to her mother Suzanne Camejo, so please don't steal them.) Little is known right now about the driver who hit the two of them when they stepped off the curb, except that she is in a mental ward for observation, (as we all might be considering the circumstances,) and the friend, a young man, was hardly hurt having been hit first but escaped with minor injuries. The trauma of him thrown against her or her being thrown in the air from that and hitting the pavement was too much for Gabriella's small frame. Its all being investigated still, and the boy, Kent is back home with his mother, leaving many questions still unanswered.

So now, less than 24 hours after a chilling midnight knock on the door from the sheriff in their California town, my father and Suzanne are traveling to get Gabriella, pack up her life at college, and drive her body back to the family compound in Tennessee to be buried. After that, all thats left is to try to make sense of the loss of a promising talent who was a nice and good person. The fact that she was also strikingly beautiful was probably more of a burden for her, as people assume so much about people from how they look, on both sides of the spectrum; she was just learning about the facts of that complex matter. She was a happy girl who had plans...a business plan, and plans for a life. What can I say? She loved her life, the beach, the many, many dogs that her mom was rescuing all the time, chihuahuas in particular, and her mom....she really loved her mom alot; they were two peas in a pod and they should have had more time together.

The very odd thing is that I didn't really know Gabriella. She was someone who might have been like a sister to me, in that we shared bits of a father across the space-time continuum, but since she was in LA and I'm on the east coast, she was young and I am twice her age, dealing with the matters of an extended family that its better that she never had to know the details of, we just didn't. Her mother, Suzanne, has this uncanny and sometimes annoying need to document everything she experiences in words and pictures and pass these things on to a huge mailing list of friends and family. So it happened that during the past 7 years I have watched this kid grow up from afar and through pictures, as my father taught her to drive and helped her with college visits and threw all of his spare resources into her. She didn't have much of a father in her birth father, and so he was able to fill in for whatever that can mean to a kid...its something. He hadn't been the greatest father to my sister and I...but that's another story from long ago....so, if the universe hands people second chances, I guess that Gabriella was his.

This is the sort of thing that makes you check your kids sleeping too late on winter break and thank whatever god there might be that the grace of randomness hasn't touched this home. You cant hold them too close, you have to let them go, knowing that anything can happen...anything, any time...Indeed, in the cruelest truth of this whole mess, Suzanne lost Gabriella's sister, Chantica, at 16, in a tragic car crash many, many years ago. This made Gabriella's role in Suzanne's life all the more important.
Its just sad...that's all...

Where is the blame? The college? They warn the kids all the time about Baltimore's terrible statistics on pedestrian vs. vehicle fatalities; every 100 minutes or so, there is one of these, elevating the trauma centers there to an elite level of care. There is so much more to say about a campus that is in a dangerous spot and yet does little to protect its students.

Maybe its a society that spends more energy on capitalism and the terrorism that it brings than infrastructure and law? The cronyism rampant in a city that uses its famous art institute as a selling point to bring in business, and yet turns its backs of the safety of the student who are the blood of that institute.

The boy? Kent? What were the details and shouldn't he have been "taking care of her?" who knows?...his personal tragedy will surely play out in its own time, as we weren't there and cant know his part one way or another (he has no memory of details, which is understandable, but I for one, am looking forward to when he regains his memory.)


Is it OK for the Baltimore metro area residents that as many as 5 pedestrians per day are killed by vehicles? From my quick survey of the top pedestrian danger zones and who the victims are, I can see that the issues range from cities where walking is the primary mode of transportation, to socioeconomic issues in that if you can't afford a car, you walk. Trends vary depending on what a metropolitan area does in response to specific trouble spots, and much can be done...but often, apparently its not. Gabriella was aware and careful, but we know that not many streets around the campus area are safe day or night, and beyond that, we can't know... that's part of whats so hard about this....



I hope that there is a heaven for random victims and all of the good and promising people lost to senselessness. I wish I had that comfort inside of myself, but for me its just not like that. All I can ever do is to take what happens and try to make it into something good in some way as the path becomes apparent. This is not my tragedy per se, its a loss to a world in need of good, strong kids to pull us out of the morass that we've sunk to.

RIP Gabriella, Godspeed

Gabriella Camejo
1/11/87 to 2/15/09


note: corrections added 02-23-09