With newly released pictures and information on the man alleged to be the Baseline Killer, the predator is no longer just a blurred, looming danger on the nightly news. The attacker is beginning to be actualized as a person, confronting the public anew with the potential of the individual and the quality of the world we live in.
Alvin Hogue is the husband of Romelia Varagas, who was killed alongside her co-worker, Mirna Palma-Roman, while they worked one afternoon in their Phoenix lunch truck. Both were shot, unprovoked, on an average day.
"I still don't believe it," the Arizona Republic has quoted Hogue as saying. "I've come to terms that it happened. But it's unbelievable in my mind."
For the larger body of the public, however, it is easy to grab onto the newly offered security that comes with the capture of the person allegedly responsible and settle into a renewed comfort and ease in routines.
But for many of us, shrugging off the startling reality of the case is letting go of a needed reminder of the society around us.
Shrugging it off is particularly easy for students at ASU. Many of us become so absorbed with university life that we are isolated in it.
What happens in the greater areas of Phoenix often might as well have been on some far-off coast. But these attacks happened on the streets of our communities, and hopefully will shake us from the neglect that distance often allows us in dealing with tragedy.
University students are also notoriously confused and uncertain in their dealings with tragedy and the issues of morality and personal response involved. As new initiates into the moral relativism and ambiguity of academic thought, the young college student is known not for their resolve or stability, but for questions.
But in the brutal realities of something like the assaults and murders of the recent news, there is an undeniable voice of violation and wrong that begs to be received.
One can listen to the arguments of the killer's perspective that allows for uniquely individual implications for his or her actions.
But such sickeningly violent actions speak in an overbearing, superior cry of wrong that should wake anyone who has found contentment and disinterest in ambiguity and compel them to look straight and coldly at what people are capable of.
The things done by the Baseline Killer are not something that can be catalogued off into some dark corner of the radical or that of fringe disorder.
A recalling of history or time spent in global news show the human condition has a lot that needs answering to.
Good and noble pleasures and imperatives in life will always keep people moving. Life is not meant to be lived in fear.
But realities such as the assaults and murders of the person behind the Baseline Killer are a needed wake-up call for many of us.
As a community, we need to come together to shoulder this tragedy. But also, as individuals, we need to confront what it reveals of the flaws of our nature, so that we can live in understanding of what we are capable of and better care for the people we live with and the societies we create.
Reach the reporter at:matthew.bowman@asu.edu.
