Murder is an incomprehensible act

and it must cause irreparable damage to not just the victims but to everyone else immediately involved.

There has been a double murder in this state. I don't know the victims, young students. For a moment I thought I did know the girl. I thought she was one of the students who had sought help with an essay last year. She isn't but, for that moment, I thought she was.

This morning the photograph has gone from the internet and there is a suppression order in place. It is a bit late for that. The news will be all over two universities. There will be students, friends of the two young victims and many more, who will have to try and come to terms with something that is incomprehensible.

I went to school with someone who was murdered. He was in a class some years below me. I knew his name and very little more about him. The murder was drug related and the murderer has never been caught. The young man was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was away on the other side of the world at the time. Apart from feeling intensely sad for his parents it didn't really touch me.

Later though I came to know a couple whose daughter was murdered. She was the very young victim in a particularly horrific series of murders - snatched on her way home from school. Her parents, now both deceased, were both lovely people. Despite the tragedy in their own lives they were both kind and caring. Their marriage had somehow survived  the trauma too. People used to say they were "over it" but of course they were not.  You don't recover from something like that although you may learn to somehow live with it. 

And now I wonder how those involved in this present tragedy will learn to live with it. There are apparently two very young witnesses to the act. They are going to need help and support for a very long time to come.

I am  sitting here feeling guilty at my relief that the victim was not the person I thought she was, that the victim was not someone I knew - however briefly. It should not make a difference but of course it does.