MURDERS ARE PAINFUL, TOO

THE horrific tragedy of Minister Lisa Morris-Julian and her young children’s deaths is indeed “an unbearable loss,” as Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley labelled it.

“This loss resonates throughout the country,” Finance Minister Colm Imbert correctly said.

It is a singular heartbreak when an elected public official – a young woman, too – perishes in a horrendous blaze in her community, unable to be saved by firefighters.

The horror is compounded by the fact that Ms. Morris-Julian was a member of a family with deep and abiding roots in public service.

Her dad, Leroy, with whom I was familiar, was a predecessor Mayor of Arima and a people person.

As an aside, her aunt, Linda Morris, served the T&T Mirror team sumptuous lunches – and some beverages, too – at her cosy Barataria eatery.

The stark outpouring of grief by Ms. Morris-Julian’s political colleagues is expected and understandable.

This public sorrow has set off an alternative narrative that government officials are insensitive to the unchecked spate of murders, like that of granny Amina Mohammed, killed in her home with her kitchen knife.

The line is that government heavy-rollers who are anguished by Ms. Morris-Julian’s tragic passing show no distress amid gory murders of common citizens.

The police boss does not turn up at disaster sites, in pious manner and profound declarations.

Loved ones endure lonely pain.

In turn, those cynics are being demonised as uncaring and indifferent at a time of national pain.

But both things could be true.

The unspeakable Morris-Julian calamity does not cancel out the hurt, especially of many who suffered the tragic loss of relatives and friends to armed and brutal killers.

On top of that, more than 90 per cent of serious offences remain unsolved.

There are still no strategies to counter the criminal epidemic even as US authorities report that gangsters are landing more powerful weapons through porous coasts.

Last weekend, the police chief and the junior security minister again mouthed platitudes of an all-out crime crackdown.

Those assurances are empty since the homicide rate is comparable to that of Haiti, which the New York Times last week termed “a failed state.”

The awful deaths of the Morris-Julian family are heart-wrenching and sobering, but so, too, are the monstrous killings of ordinary law-abiding citizens.