Don’t Equate Money With Morality

Police say it happened like this: Early that morning, Amy Grossberg gave birth in a motel room in Newark, Del. Her boyfriend, Brian Peterson, took the baby and stuffed it into a garbage bag, pulled the drawstrings tight and dumped it in a trash bin. The temperature outside was below freezing, but police who found the baby later that day say it wasn’t the cold that killed. Rather, it was the skull fractures.

Friends of the two 18-year-old college freshmen and accused murderers say they are the “nicest kids” you could ever meet. Indeed, a high school yearbook photo presents them as smiling, apple-cheeked and wholesome, two sweet-faced white kids from the upper crust. Peterson’s attorney, looking for empathy, has referred to his client as a “baby” himself.

And so, people profess to be shocked. As Grossberg’s attorney, Charles Oberly III, recently explained it: “Maybe we expect criminality to occur in certain aspects of society.”

“Certain aspects,” he said. What loaded, coded words. They lend antiseptic innocence to an odious statement, sit atop his meaning like a room deodorizer on a dung heap. “Certain aspects.” A neat, lawyerly way of referring to black people, brown people and, yes, poor and uneducated people of whatever race or ethnicity.

We expect criminality from them, he says. As if the abomination his client is alleged to have committed might be less incomprehensible had it originated where se habla espanol. Or where the brothers gather. Or where white people live in trailers.

The audacity of the assumption leaves me struggling with an anger that looms above the heinous crime. An anger that makes me want to scream at people who are shocked because they thought things like this don’t happen to people like those in places like that.

“… We expect criminality … in certain aspects …” the attorney said. It’s been a long time since I heard a statement of such bare-knuckles classism, and so a declaration of the obvious seems necessary: We should not “expect” this kind of barbarism from anyone.

And yet, the lawyer has a point, doesn’t he? That’s the sad part.

Let the unthinkable happen in certain neighborhoods, among certain people, and our response is conditioned and predictable. We cluck pieties, speak words of remorse and move on, essentially unfazed.

Let the same things happen in middle or upper class neighborhoods, in places where they wrap themselves in the delusion of seclusion, and all hell breaks loose. I remember when I lived in Los Angeles, how media kicked into overdrive and police started barricading streets after a gang shooting left ONE woman dead in the tony Westwood district. Those of us who lived in communities where it was not unknown for gang violence to pick off half a dozen in a single weekend with barely a nod of notice from media and police could only marvel at the disparity.

What do you think it says to a child that some expect terrible things from people like her? How long do you think it takes her to assimilate that expectation - to learn to accept criminality and failure as her natural element?

Not long enough. Not nearly.

I am insulted that anyone is surprised that the rich, the beautiful or the white could be capable of murder. After the Billionaire Boys Club and O.J. Simpson, after John DuPont and the “rough sex” murder case where a rich preppy admitted to strangling his girlfriend, how can we continue to believe that the rich are somehow different, higher, intrinsically BETTER than we?

Money is not a badge of morality, but a barometer of financial standing. It can only magnify what we are - not change it.

And if a rich person is an amoral, psychopathic piece of man-trash who prizes expediency above human life, then what, really, is the difference between him and some grubby, illiterate, thrill-killing drifter?

So I am profoundly unmoved by the call to feel empathy for murder suspects Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg on the basis that they were sweet, beautiful, wealthy or white.

For whatever it’s worth, that baby was, too.

xxxx