It’s hard to remember being so affected by a single, simple — even stupid — incident. True, I’ve spent sleepless nights over the death of a loved one, such as Mom and Dad or other close relatives and friends.

But what about days of fretting over the death of someone I never met, was never likely to meet — in fact over someone whose name before her death might have been known by only half a hundred people.

Of course, I refer to the sudden death last week of Lilly Garcia, shot dead by a participant in a road rage incident in Albuquerque. To me, the publicity on TV and the newspapers over this 4-year-old’s senseless murder ranks in import along with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 52 years ago.

Yes, Lilly’s death is as vivid to me now as was Kennedy’s death 52 years ago, when I was living in Gallup, a reporter for a newspaper, the Independent.

And because our office had an active Teletype machine that spewed out the day’s news, we were among the first to learn that our president had been gunned down in Dallas. Five decades ago, TV was still young, the cell phone hadn’t yet been invented, and the Internet was still a dream.

A high-school girlfriend, Evelyn, taught school in Gallup at the time and called me at work. “I’m taking his death so personally,” I remember her telling me. It sounded as if she had been crying — along with thousands of others in Gallup — and everywhere else. Optic writer Lupita Gonzales, at the time a parochial school student in Gallup, has told me school was dismissed upon the news of Kennedy’s death, and students went home or to other students’ homes to watch the events on TV — and shed a few tears.

I took what Evelyn said personally.

The death of Lilly Garcia and the abundance of information about her (a candlelight vigil, public speeches, fund-raisers, funeral arrangements, police reports, dissemination of the shooter’s criminal background) is something I can’t shake. I believe it’s simply human to project such a tragedy into our own experiences: Bonnie and I have two very young granddaughters, ages 6 and almost 4. It’s understandable that we might project the totally senseless road-rage killing to our own children or grandkids, as doubtless many others have.

And then there’s the unmitigated stupidity of the act. Police reports indicate that Alan Garcia, the father of the victim, had been reckless while on I-40 in Albuquerque.

A witness said he had been swerving his pickup truck to prevent a motorist from passing him. (What crime is being committed by trying to pass someone?) Apparently the swaying and swerving infuriated the would-be passer who must have thought: “I got it! I have a gun with me.”

And in minutes, the vehicle that prevented the shooting suspect, Tony Torrez, from passing him, gets riddled with bullets. What could possibly be so pressing that an action — albeit a stupid action — means someone has to die?

Does a handgun imbue its owner with supernatural powers? Does it embolden him? Does the shooter simply reason that taking the road rage event to the next level will make everybody feel better? My bet is that the suspect who killed little Lilly would have been able to go home to his family, enjoy a good meal, play with his kids and sleep well that night. All these things could have happened if Torrez had simply brushed off the incident.

That scenario would have been much more likely if he’d left his handgun at home or in a place that would have forced him to think about the consequences of such an action.
We’ve all heard the worn-out mantra: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” A more realistic rendering of that sentiment should be: “People with guns kill people.”

So palpable is the effect of the senseless killing of a child that I suspect a great many of us are internalizing the death and wondering: What if?

What if some enraged motorist uses a vehicle or a gun to settle the score with someone who failed to signal or forgot to dim his lights or followed too closely? How much better do people think they’re going to feel after someone on the road has flipped them off, and the priority now is to get even, to teach that jerk a lesson?

Unfortunately, the death of a little one — a permanent “solution” to a temporary problem, has become commonplace. There are some potentially violent people out there.

Sunday’s Journal quotes an Yvette Cordova, who, along with her husband, Julian, attended Lilly’s vigil with their five children. The article mentions that the Cordovas have picked up their own children from school many times and have had encounters with a handful of aggressive drivers.

The killing of Lilly “hit so close to home,” Julian Cordova said. Then his wife added, that she hugs her almost-4-year-old daughter “extra tight” lately. Strange how such tragedies impel us to cling tighter to loved ones.

Our own Danish grandchildren, 6 and almost 4 years old, are in Copenhagen, half a world away. We expect to see them in November when we meet on a trip to Nuremberg and Hungary.

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