RICHMOND, Va. (WTVR)--Wow. So many are worked up about one of the Boston bombing suspects being buried here in sweet ol’ Virginia.
Hello! He’s dead. He can’t hurt anyone else.
We’re the kind of country that, for the most part, recognizes that simple fact.
Some of our worst criminals and killers have regular burial sites, some of them quite nice.
The remains of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, are buried behind the Booth family obelisk in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.
Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of President Kennedy, is buried at Rose Hill Memorial Park in Fort Worth Texas.
The remains of Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, are believed to be buried somewhere in Fairfax, Virginia.
Richmond’s own James and Linwood Briley, who killed 11 people here during a 1979 rampage, have nicely kept burial plots and pretty headstones in Council Cemetery in Pitt County, North Carolina.
Consider that their death toll is more than three times that of the Boston Bombers.
But nothing compared with that of John Wayne Gacy, who buried the bodies of 29 young men and boys on his suburban Chicago property.
His body is reportedly buried at Mary Hill Cemetery not far from his home, although that location has been questioned.
A very similarly twisted mass killer, Dean Corll, - The Candy Man – killed 27 boys and young men in Houston during the early ‘70s. He’s buried at the Grand View Memorial Park in Harris County, Texas.
The list goes on.
The king of homegrown mass killers, Timothy McVeigh, was a veteran and therefore was qualified for a military burial. A new federal law kept that from happening. His ashes were given to his lawyer, who scattered the ashes at an undisclosed location.
The ashes of John Allen Muhammad, the Beltway sniper, were reportedly given to a family member or friend. It’s unclear what happened to them. They could’ve been scattered anywhere.
And that’s fairly typical for the worst criminals executed in this state. The Virginia Department of Corrections policy is, if no one claims the body, it’s is cremated and the ashes are disposed of by the funeral home that does the cremation.
And does any of this really matter?
I say, hats off to Martha Mullen, the woman behind the Virginia burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, for having the courage of her convictions.
The only ones who have the right to complain, seems to me, are the families of those who are buried in that same cemetery.
Look, this mad bomber is six feet from the rest of his life. Forever.
What more do you want? Drag his body through the streets?
No. That’s what separates us from so many other cultures. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
That’s my take, please leave yours here on WTVR.com
