Tragedy leaves community asking questions
Every news story begins with the same six questions.
Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? On the night of April 9, town of Pershing residents Josh and Becky Mann were gunned down in their home by 15-year-old Kadyn D. Hadden. The boy later committed suicide and his body was found in a vehicle in Price County.
Those 41 words bluntly answer five of those six questions, leaving family and community members puzzling over the question of “Why?”
Why did this happen? By virtually every metric, Taylor County is a safe place to live. It is a place where people know one another and where relationships often go back generations. It is a place where many people routinely do not lock their cars, or even their homes. It is a place where children are sent out to play with parents often more concerned about interactions with wildlife than about the depravities of man.
In the fraction of a second it took to pull the trigger, Taylor County became a darker and more dangerous place. In that fraction of a second, between impulse and action, families were broken, lives were wasted and community members felt the coppery taste of fear in their mouths.
Why? Why did this boy commit such a heinous act? Was this a one-off act of irredeemable and random violence or is there more to the story? Are we safe?
The three people in the town of Pershing home that night are dead and beyond the ability to tell their stories and explain their actions. Investigators with local and state law enforcement agencies are piecing together the story from the clues left behind, but even then the full tale may never be known.
On Wednesday night family and community members gathered for a candlelight vigil — seeking comfort in the embrace of a loving and supportive community. There is bravery to be found in the crowd, and hope for brighter, if not happier days ahead.
Some wounds never heal. Time softens the edges and takes away the sharpness of the pain, until it remains a dull ache, just one of the many that we carry with us as we grow older. We feel these aches as individuals and as communities, carrying with us cares and worries about what we could have along the long chain of causalities to change the outcome. Such thoughts are natural, but ultimately self-defeating.
Tragedies are the tempering furnace of individuals, families and communities. In metal working the tempering process exposes the cracks and imperfections that will cause outwardly ideal pieces to shatter, irretrievably broken. Tempering likewise strengthens and bonds the materials together making it stronger and better than it was before.
We may never know what led a 15 year old boy to drive across the county to commit murder. But, as the community gathers to grieve and to slowly attempt to heal and move on from this tragedy, we cannot let this break us, but rather must emerge stronger and ready to push the darkness away.
