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When someone you know is murdered, it messes with your sense of trust. It’s different than just reading about a murder since the grief and loss is compounded with the knowledge that another human being did this on purpose, and if the murder is unsolved, those feelings are mixed with a sense that killer or killers are still out there too. Basically, the violence hits you in your gut, and you’re never truly able to shake it.
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When someone you know is murdered, it messes with your sense of trust. It’s different than just reading about a murder since the grief and loss is compounded with the knowledge that another human being did this on purpose, and if the murder is unsolved, those feelings are mixed with a sense that killer or killers are still out there too. Basically, the violence hits you in your gut, and you’re never truly able to shake it.
Today September 11, 2013, marks two years, since my friend Erik Weissman was killed. His body was found on September 12th, with Brendan Mess and Raphael Teken in Brendan’s Waltham, MA apartment. Somebody slit their throats. Then like some sort of sick demented joke, the killers threw marijuana on their bleeding bodies.
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Full disclosure: Erik and I became friends around 2007 and my father Norman Zalkind, a criminal defense attorney, was representing him for a 2011 drug charge at the time of his death.
In the months after the murder, I used to stay up at night imaging what the people who killed my friend must be thinking, must be doing out there, walking freely among society. Were they buying soda from 7-Eleven? Were they going out to eat with their friends? My optimistic worldview was shattered and I suffered because of it. Then, I took a leap of faith. I convinced myself that law enforcement was doing everything in their power to solve the case, and that the killers would one day see justice. It was naiveté, but I slept better.
If I took a leap of faith, I fell with a hard crash on May 22, 2013, when the news broke that the FBI shot Ibragim Todashev to death. This was a man who, according to reports leaked to the press by the FBI, implicated himself and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the alleged bomber of the Boston Marathon, in the Waltham triple murder. Reports say Todashev was about to sign a confession, before the situation escalated and he was killed by an FBI agent from the Boston office, in his own home in Orlando, FL, hours into one of several interviews Todashev agreed to participate in.
The families of the three young men in Waltham are not taking the FBI’s reports at face value.
