The Bigger Betrayal
As I write this post, newspaper accounts report on the suspicious death of a man and his daughter aboard a small plane that crashed. The plane, it turns out, dove near the man’s former mother-in-law. That in itself is suspicious, though I wrote it off at first as a likely accident. After all, one of the first things passengers want to do when they find themselves flying in a small plane is to view a familiar site from the air. I myself circled my home many times when I was a student pilot. It’s a thrill. And I can see too easily how a small mistake while circling a familiar landmark could result in a serious accident. There simply isn’t much room for error when you’re flying 500 to 1,000 feet above the ground! Alas, the facts clearly point to an intentional tragedy.
The pilot was a student pilot, which means he should not have taken a passenger onboard. The passenger, his eight-year-old daughter, was in the middle of a bitter feud between her parents. According to the newspaper accounts, the father had lost custody of his girl, and he wanted desperately to strike back at his ex-wife and hurt her. The plan he came up with was simple: Kill his daughter in the most memorable fashion he could imagine. He took her with him in a small plane, then deliberately crashed the plane at the home of his former in-laws.
As a pilot, I know that sometimes fellow pilots have committed suicide by flying their small planes into the ground. I can’t relate to that, but I have a certain respect for it. I mean, if you are going to end your life, flying a Cessna or Piper into a fatal dive gets high marks for aesthetic value. I assume here, of course, that the pilot owns the plane in question, so that there are no moral issues of collateral vandalism to consider. Moreover, it is part of the code of ethics for pilots to protect the people in the ground. So any pilot who decides to commit suicide in this way would crash his plane into a wide open field, not someone’s house. For a pilot to deliberately damage a ground structure, possibly putting people on the ground at risk, and definitely putting a passenger at risk, well, that is simply a complete betrayal of the pilot’s code.
Now, I can understand that lovers can harbor bitterness and ill will towards each other after a painful breakup. I can also understand the abject depression that would come when losing not only a spouse, but also your children. And yes, I can understand wanting to hurt your former spouse over this loss.
But to kill your own child over this? This is simply insane. An eight-year old can not defend herself against you. Throughout her life, she has learned to put her faith in you, even if you don’t always deserve it. But to betray an eight-year-old child by deliberately hurting her–nay, killing her–is betrayal of an unfathomable scale. According to the news reports, the man called his former in-laws before carrying out his plans. As he was talking, his daughter was screaming “Mommy, come get me!” She knew. She knew. She knew that she was going to die at the hands of a man she almost certainly worshipped, her dad.
May there be a special hell for parents who hurt their children so, and for parents who use their children as pawns in the end-game of their marriage.
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