More Thoughts On The Bear-Slayer
311 words.
By Thomas Krehbiel
When I first read the Times-Dispatch story on Julia the Bear-Slayer, I pretty much bought her tale hook, line, and sinker. The picture of her boy’s “I’m sorry” card scrawled in crayon was just too poignant not to believe.
But the more I think about it and the more skeptical opinions I hear, the more I’ve wondered if there isn’t more to this story than meets the eye. Morchower’s involvement automatically makes me suspicious-it was the only blight on an otherwise perfect story. I think she was smart to hire a lawyer, fearing child negligence investigations after the public uproar and the initial reports of someone helping the child over the fence. But such a prominent Richmond lawyer? Could Julia be hiding something?
When you think about it, what’s to stop her from altering some elements of her story? Were there any eyewitnesses to her son’s fence-climbing escapade? Morchower undoubtedly would have grilled her on that point. If nobody really saw it, she could freely tell everyone that she turned her back for “a few seconds” when it might have actually been “a few minutes.” Or perhaps she may have left someone out of the story altogether; a boyfriend, perhaps. And is that really so bad? Wouldn’t any of us do the same thing to avoid an entanglement with the dreaded Child Protective Services?
I’m getting bear-fatigue, so I need to wrap this up and look for something else to write about. In the end I’m still against lynching Julia. She may have shown some bad judgment, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. The Richmond bureaucracy also showed some pretty bad judgment in rushing to euthanize the obviously non-rabid bears.
I think the moral of this story is pretty clear: Don’t tell the emergency room nurse if your kid’s been bitten by a Maymont animal.
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