it was suicide after all-third report
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janet in venice ®

08/18/2005, 14:14:05
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here i am again, with yet the third iteration on this.

as they say in the military, first reports are always wrong. you have to wait for all the details to come in.

the coroner says , No, it definitely wasn't an accidental.
they found shotgun wadding in his mouth and pellets, and the top of his skull was split open from inside, from the force. he used the flare gun, but his stepsister's boyfriend says he knew step bought a shotgun shell two weeks ago. the kid put it in the flare gun and aimed it in his mouth at the upper palate.

so the pendulaum swings back to the original theory. suicide, not accidental.

stepan had childish emotional understandings, unfortunately with adult information and capabilities. he was probably tangled up in a surly, pouting, mad, stubbornly misunderstanding interpretation of things we had said to him, about his disability, about his prospects for a career, about why his school friends didn't call like he hoped they would, about why his highschool sweethearts married other guys, not him...it could have been any number of things that upset him and he didn't like, that we had gone over and over with him before, that he'd deny & didn't want to accept as true. we'd had these
stormy reactions with him before, and talked him thru it, until he found a sunny aspect that broke thru, and he could come out of it.

the difference was, this time he had a way to kill himself lined up in secret, and no one within reach to find him and save him. the gun would not have made the kind of sound that would alert the neighbors, and there was a thunderstorm coming in to obscure the noise. even the dog didn't know.

he planned this. he bought the flare gun over the internet a month ago; it seems he bought the shotgun shell locally, two weeks back. you don't have to go thru the background check to buy a flare gun, like you have to if you go to buy a metal gun at a gun shop. for that matter, it probably would have passed a metal detector too.

bits of things i remember are coming back to me in my mental 'data search,' to see if i can bring back anything pertinent to this. i remember him calling me sometime in midweek last week and saying something about 'Dad is realy mad at you." and me asking with great interest "He is? what's he mad about?" and Stepan kind of irritably brushing past it at the time, saying " He's got a lot of bitterness toward you. I can't go into it now", and i think that's when he said ' i have to mow the lawn so i can take the lawnmower back to Grandma's on Sunday".

and now i'm racking my brain, trying to find anything i noticed that might have pointed to this.

David says they all went to a family meeting with Stepan's doctors last tuesday, and David relates that he expressed a lot of anger in that session, in a rant about how he wanted Stepan to understand that he couldn't count on being dependent on David's support forever, that he wanted him to be seriously making plans for moving out, getting his own place, having a career in life, living like a young man should be, by the time he was in his late 20's. Maybe this was the time when David expressed his anger about me and the way i live on my disability checks. I don't know. David says the next day Stepan thanked him for pouring all that out, that it helped him to understand his father a lot better. Maybe it's also why Stepan avoided reading my email, late last week, that i sent, to tell them i was finally shipping them the things he left here. Step told his dad " No, I don't wanna read it, I"ll just get mad at her. I hate my mom."

i'm not taking his stormy comments to heart. this was typical cycling for him. like a child, he'd get tantrum-y about something, not understand it and fight us on it, then brighten up and go on, and later come back to us and say he got it later in perfect 20 20 retrospect and saw how stupid his original misunderstanding was.

this time, he didn't wait for the clarity to arrive.

they are holding a service for him tomorrow afternoon in west haven CT.if any of you are near there and want to go, email me for the full announcement.

i asked for as many long locks of his hair as they could give me to save. they are cremating him tomorrow night.
david speculated that they could dress him in a brand new 300 dollar suit that was bought for him and he never wore, and i mused that in Islam, true martyrs are'nt undressed or washed for burial, they send them to God exactly the way they died, in their bloody clothes, just as they were found. I mused that Stepan was basically still a child, full of innocent love for everything, and maybe we should take a cue from the Islamic feeling, and send him off just the way we found him--in his rainsoaked clothes, wet T shirt, baggy thrift store pants, and sneakers with laces in only one shoe. dressing him up in a suit seemed kind of silly.







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