"I Want To Cry"
Children depend upon the parental love and protection they are entitled to as children, to help them face a world that without that support and guidance would be a confusing and alienating one. The sense of security and all-encompassing love in support of their needs is a vital one. To remove that sense of comfort, security and love is to destroy a child's innocence and to destine that child to live an agony of remorseless need unfulfilled.
Could anything be more destructive to a child's sense of security than the sudden departure of their parents? Bereft of the warmth, the support and the love that a child's parents guaranteed by their presence, the child faces life as a bereaved and comfortless soul. And when that child has the memory of beloved parents in violent conflict with each other, and the memory of having witnessed one parent murdering the other what kind of future has the child been consigned to?
That is most certainly the case with a ten year-old Ottawa girl whose father killed her mother in 2008, when she was eight years of age. Her younger brother, three at the time of the murder, may be substantially less affected than his sister. And it was the now-ten-year-old girl who produced a victim impact statement at the sentencing hearing for her father, Demetrios Angelis.
"If I had a magic wand I would want to see my mom and dad. What I miss most is that I cannot talk to them or do things with them anymore", she wrote. At her father's trial the girl testified that her mother and father struck and kicked one another and how her father finally gained through his superior strength, and smothered his wife to death in the presence of their two children.
The girl described her mother attempting to persuade her to run outside and alert someone to help her. But she was too shy to obey her mother, to run outside their home and bring someone back with her. Her father was convicted of second-degree murder, given a mandatory life-in-prison sentence. The father incarcerated for murder, the mother dead at her husband's hands.
"She used to braid my hair, paint my nails", and time was happily spent shopping, going to the movies, to the beach, or to restaurants, wrote the little girl of her mother. "...sometimes I want to have pyjama days and be sad", she reflected on her irreplaceably anguished loss.
Could anything be more destructive to a child's sense of security than the sudden departure of their parents? Bereft of the warmth, the support and the love that a child's parents guaranteed by their presence, the child faces life as a bereaved and comfortless soul. And when that child has the memory of beloved parents in violent conflict with each other, and the memory of having witnessed one parent murdering the other what kind of future has the child been consigned to?
That is most certainly the case with a ten year-old Ottawa girl whose father killed her mother in 2008, when she was eight years of age. Her younger brother, three at the time of the murder, may be substantially less affected than his sister. And it was the now-ten-year-old girl who produced a victim impact statement at the sentencing hearing for her father, Demetrios Angelis.
"If I had a magic wand I would want to see my mom and dad. What I miss most is that I cannot talk to them or do things with them anymore", she wrote. At her father's trial the girl testified that her mother and father struck and kicked one another and how her father finally gained through his superior strength, and smothered his wife to death in the presence of their two children.
The girl described her mother attempting to persuade her to run outside and alert someone to help her. But she was too shy to obey her mother, to run outside their home and bring someone back with her. Her father was convicted of second-degree murder, given a mandatory life-in-prison sentence. The father incarcerated for murder, the mother dead at her husband's hands.
"She used to braid my hair, paint my nails", and time was happily spent shopping, going to the movies, to the beach, or to restaurants, wrote the little girl of her mother. "...sometimes I want to have pyjama days and be sad", she reflected on her irreplaceably anguished loss.
Labels: Family, Ottawa, United States
posted by Pieface @ 6:53 PM
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