How Can We Fight Evil When We Allow It To Strike?

It is hard to fathom the courage it took for Dr. William Petit to appear Saturday at a memorial service in New Britain before hundreds of family members, friends neighbors and strangers eager to show their support for his unimaginable loss.

He has just laid to rest his entire family the day before, their lives ended by a spasm of violence that has no explanation or purpose. We all must pray for Dr. Petit as he seeks to recover and seek solace and support for months and years ahead. His father, Bill Petit, was a former member of the State Central Committee and a good friend of every Republican. His losses and pain cannot be measured.

Trying to make sense of what happened last week will take much time and most of it should be spent by doing what Dr. Petit urged in his moving tribute to his wife, Jennifer, his daughters Hayley and Michael.



"I guess if there is anything to be gained from the senseless deaths of my beautiful family, it's for us all to go forward with the inclination to live with a faith that embodies action, help a neighbor, fight for a cause, love your family." Live well, he told them. And, he said, "spread the work of these three wonderful women."

And while Dr. Petit's world has been changed forever, what do we learn from this incident which has unleashed emotions from shock and sorrow to outrage and vengeance?

Evil lurks amongst us constantly and often it rears its head in places that we think should be safe - a quite suburb, late a night, when the work of the day is over and the family reassembles to quietly assess the day and prepare for the next day of challenges.

Two miscreants, who have long strayed from acceptable norms of behavior and did not make any effort to amend their behaviors or start anew, selected the Petit family and struck savagely. Their mug shots show two people with blank stares of indifference, as if they were stopped mistakenly for driving with expired plates.

Somewhere in the byzantine workings of the Department of Correction are files, some incomplete, which were never properly evaluated or challenges when Steven Hayes, 44, and Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, came through the revolving door of what passes for justice in Connecticut. Someone simply was either lazy, didn't care or took their eye off the file. Either way, those on the parole panel must have felt there was no price to pay for whisking these two back onto the streets without a warning and hoping for the best or simply believing no one would find out.

Somehow in our inert justice system someone who breaks into a home and violates the sanctity of that domicile is not a violent person. Somehow someone who has 26 arrests falls into a category that makes them eligible for early release, even after failing a drug test.

Someone sent me one statistic from the state that should make everyone think about buying a side arm. During the month that the two cons were paroled, 94 percent of those who applied for parole, received it.

And this is the same government structure, handcuffed by the Legislature, that makes it harder on gun owners to arm themselves than those who do harm. No wonder there were lines reported over the last week at Hoffman's Gun Store in Newington.

One can only wonder where the liberal Democrats like Judiciary Chairmen Mike Lawlor, D-East Haven and State Sen. Andrew McDonald, D-Stamford, will take us in the next legislative session. My guess is the Democrats will call for more education funding, more funding for job training for convicted felons, more funding for parolee intervention programs and more task force studies on the disparity of sentencing along racial lines. And of course, the Democrats will blame the disparity in incomes for these social problems. If we just had a millionaire's tax, then we could balance everything out and no one would be without.

Gov. Rell has rightly called for a top to bottom review of the entire parole system and supported the death penalty for the suspects if convicted on the felony murder counts. But the public has to wake up and start holding the liberal Democratic legislator's who got us here accountable. We are reaping the years of King Richard Tulisano's edicts on what is classified as a "mitigating" circumstance which prevents these type of cons from getting the needle. During Tuisano's years as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, it became altogether impossible for any deviant, long convicted and proven guilty even beyond DNA certainty of capital felonies, from being removed from the earth by lethal injection.

To them violent crime is a social failure based on low minimum wage, lack of affordable health care and racism.

Evil still lurks amongst us. What are we prepared to do about it?