Bee Opinionated: ‘Executions’ in Goshen + Goodbye in Vacaville + A California Nightmare | Opinion
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I’m Robin Epley, with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board.
Last week was a hard one, with the news of multiple “execution-style” murders in the tiny community of Goshen, in Tulare County. Six family members were killed at their home in the unincorporated community of just 5,000 people, tucked between Visalia and Highway 99.
“With each life taken, our sense of community is devalued,” wrote The Fresno Bee Editorial Board. “We may look away because it is too painful, but we can’t escape the reality that our collective lives have been diminished. Our light is dimmer.”
Among the dead are a 16-year-old mother and her 10-month-old baby. Authorities are offering a $10,000 reward for help in solving the case.
The Valley is no stranger to violence: In December, Fresno Police arrested a 41-year-old man accused of murdering his 26-year-old sister, N-Kya Rebecca Logan. Logan was, at the time of her death, 36 weeks pregnant. And in September, a Fresno woman and her boyfriend allegedly shot and killed her 18-year-old sister and her 3-week-old baby.
The dead in Goshen last week were Eladio Parraz Jr., 52; Marcos Parraz, 19; Jennifer Analla, 49; Rosa Parraz, 72; Elyssa Parraz, 16; and 10-month-old Nycholas Parraz.
In the wake of so much tragedy, The Fresno Bee Editorial Board wrote a moving piece about how we mourn, but also about how we heal:
“So many in the Valley suffer from a loss of hope. But, thankfully, not everyone in this Valley has lost the ability to hope. If you are someone who cares, here is what you can do to make this Valley better: Find just one person who needs encouragement, who needs a reason to keep going, do your best to lift up that person. Do whatever comes naturally and for as long as it takes. If you can do just one thing, that person can become the next one with hope and can pass it along to another hurting soul…. It can happen in English. In Spanish. Hmong, Punjabi, Armenian, Chinese and Russian. Heartbreak happens person by person. Rebuilding is one at a time, too.”
Saying Goodbye to Mark Rippee
“Most of those who should have attended Mark Rippee’s gut-wrenching and also highly political Friday memorial service weren’t there. So they didn’t have to hear the mothers, sisters and wives of seriously mentally ill Californians crying out not to heaven, but to Sacramento. Where state officials have systematically denied any meaningful help to those like Mark, who died homeless in his hometown on Nov. 29.”
Metro columnist Melinda Henneberger wrote last week about the memorial service of Mark Rippee, a blind, schizophrenic homeless man she first profiled last summer. Rippee died of multiple organ failure in Vacaville, after an untreated urinary tract infection caused sepsis, more than 20 years after he suffered a motorcycle accident that left him blind and mentally ill.
“In her eulogy, Catherine (Rippee-Hanson) remembered him at age 7, ‘standing by the creek at the railroad tracks pointing down at me in the muddy water where I stood catching tadpoles while he proudly yelled to his friends, “That’s my sister! She’s not afraid of anything!”’ Good thing, as it turned out.”
Rippee’s sisters never gave up on him, Henneberger wrote, through more than 60 surgeries for the first 20 years after his accident, and even after the voices in his head led him to attack his own mother and set a fire that canceled his last lease.
The Rippee sisters called, waylaid, lobbied and tried to educate every city, county and state official they could about their brother’s anosognosia, a symptom of severe mental illness experienced by Rippee and others that impairs their ability to understand and seek help for their illness.
“Yet because our health care system also seems to suffer from anosognosia, they were refused at every turn, and denied the public conservatorship that would and should have been funded by Solano County,” Henneberger wrote.
Rippee died alone, at age 59.
Opinion of the Week
“California … retains an irresistible allure even for people who should know better — like, say, me.” — Deputy Opinion Editor Josh Gohlke on the nightmare of the California dream. (In sad news — for us, at least — Josh’s last day at The Bee was Friday, and we will miss him very much as he moves on to a great new opportunity. Give his last Bee column a read, and I think you’ll agree that our team was incredibly lucky to have him on board.)
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In awhile, crocodiles,
Robin Epley
