Killed for Walking a Dog

[Nevilledog]

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Shannon Watts
@shannonrwatts
MUST READ: “It has been more than two years since Bella Thallas bled out on a sidewalk, for no reason at all.” The man who shot her with an AK-47 took the gun from a friend who was a Denver police sergeant and owner of a company called Tyrant Arms. #coleg

theatlantic.com
Killed for Walking a Dog
The mundanity and insanity of gun death in America
10:32 PM · Sep 21, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/isabella-thallas-murder-denver-darian-simon/671461/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/gc4iU

There is no particular reason people should care about the shooting of Isabella Thallas, which is why, as far as I can tell, not many people did. She was the only casualty, and there was no mystery as to who shot her, and in a country in which guns kill more than 40,000 people every year—well, who has the time to stop and mourn for just one of them?

But there was something about this killing, on the side of a Denver street on a sunny June morning in 2020, that captured my attention. I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to Bella Thallas. Maybe it was her age—about that of my own daughters—or maybe it was the specific circumstances of her murder, which were both mundane and completely insane.

For two years I tracked down what news I could find in the Denver press and looked in vain for the national coverage that I assumed would follow but never did. Eventually, I wrote to Bella’s family—her mother, father, sister, boyfriend—and talked to them about who Bella was and what happened on the day she died. There isn’t and never will be any satisfactory explanation for what happened to her, but I came as close as I could to understanding what was lost when it did.

“We were essentially raised by teenagers,” Bella’s sister, Lucia, says, and it’s true. Joshua Thallas and Ana Hernandez were high-school sweethearts who married right after graduation, when he was 19 and she was 18. Isabella Joy Thallas arrived soon after—a preemie, weighing less than six pounds—followed two years later by her sister, Lucia, and that birth was just as quickly followed by a divorce that was both inevitable and urgently necessary. Josh, by his own admission, had no idea at that age how to be a husband and father, and struggled to manage a dark and violent streak, at home and in the world. Ana was combative and determined in her own way. After 10 years, they married again, when Josh felt he had gotten his act together, and then divorced again for good five years later, when Ana apparently decided he had not (although Ana kept using the last name Thallas).

*snip*

[ZZenith]

1. Goddammit.

The level of insanity is insane. How do we get out of this mess?

How is it possible this story wasn’t national news?!!

Goddamn.

Thanks for linking this well-written article about yet another atrocity.

[Easterncedar]

2. That was beautifully, painfully written

Didn’t know Peter Sagal was such a writer. The last two paragraphs sum up the insanity of the way we live with the gun culture perfectly. Everyone should read this. Thanks for posting, Nevilledog.

[hlthe2b]

6. Yes. Peter Sagal can be very funny on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, but he's a very talented & sensitive

writer as well.

I remember when this happened in Denver and the killer is now on trial. As a dog-walker/lover myself this was just inconceivable. That that police sergeant who was so irresponsible with the gun now works in CO Springs sans any real sanctions is so damned wrong. F..,k all these a'holes and their guns.

[Nevilledog]

11. ...

[Rhiannon12866]

3. One more horrible, senseless tragedy...

[Celerity]

4. the 2nd Amendment is a national suicide pact

We all now live in a kind of permanent Sarajevo. Whenever we go outside, to work or school, to walk our dogs, to attend our parades, we know without saying and accept without protest that gunshots might ring out and take our lives or the lives of those we love. But we don’t think about it—we don’t scan the rooftops, because there’s no point. The gun could come from anywhere at any time, and so we do what humans do: We pretend that nothing is wrong and go about our day. We do not think of the deaths around us in the same way that we do not think of our own, inevitable deaths, because to think too deeply about them would paralyze us. Even Bella’s family, even her parents move on, because what else is there to do?

Bella should have lived and, if she liked, gone on to marry Darian and have those curly-haired children, and love them and fail them just as she had been loved and failed. But because yet another man had a moment of rage and the lethal means of expressing it, she is gone. And because we can’t bear to confront how suicidal it is to privilege over all else the rights of those damaged young men to use killing machines, we must bury the knowledge of this insanity along with Bella, who was interred in Block 117, Lot 108 of Denver’s Fairmount Cemetery, forever wearing the Dolce & Gabbana dress her mother had been saving for a special occasion.

[brer cat]

5. What an incredibly sad, tragic story.

Very well written. K&R

[hlthe2b]

7. Here is her mural in Denver

?w=1500

[kacekwl]

8. Another sad story of a war weapon destroying lives.

I love the hefty fine for not reporting a gun stolen, 25.00 dollars. If this is considered gun safety reform we're screwed.

[dalton99a]

9. Kick

It has been more than two years since Bella Thallas bled out on a sidewalk, for no reason at all. Darian has been in and out of surgeries to essentially rebuild his leg after the high-velocity rounds liquefied the bones. After many delays, included a rejected plea of insanity, Close is now on trial for first-degree murder and attempted murder, as well as for possessing and using an illegal magazine.

Politica has retired from the Denver Police Department. His lawyer maintains that it was voluntary. A spokesman for the department told The Atlantic that it had looked into the matter and determined that “no apparent policy violation occurred.” The civil suit filed against him was settled by his insurance company, which paid out his policy maximum of $500,000, with no admission of responsibility. Josh Thallas says that, during the depositions, Politica never expressed any remorse for allowing Close to take the gun—or, as Politica would have it, steal it. He now has a new job—as a police officer in Colorado Springs.

[ProfessorGAC]

10. Just A Terrible Story

A guy snapped and unloaded on someone, essentially at random.
But, we're told the problem isn't guns. It's people.
How about the problem is people WITH GUNS!???

[Volaris]

14. Yep. If he'd had to have only a knife, she'd likely still be alive.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

12. We need a Supreme Court that can read the rest of the 2nd Amendment.

[Johnny2X2X]

13. Amazing and tragic piece.

My god. This can’t be normal.