Caution: the following post contains mature and disturbing subject matter and may trigger certain individuals. Please proceed with care.

Kings County Hospital

Brooklyn, NY

July 31, 1977

People thought it was safe. He had never struck in Brooklyn.

But it wasn’t safe.

The nurse can’t exactly describe what she felt that night. She recalls reporters snapping pictures of the victim being taken from the ambulance and feeling anger. She looks back and knows they had scanners or police radios, and that’s how they knew where to be. But that doesn’t help. The pictures taken still exist, and that’s sickening.

The nurse had heard that the victims were coming in: the .44 Caliber Killer was feared to have struck again.

Two victims, one male, one female, both 20-years-old, had head wounds. The emergency room went into overdrive; the trauma center geared up.

The nurse knew the young woman was going to die. Two huge slugs through the brain. The shock caused one eye to become partially extruded. The slugs had wrought profound damage, easily visible: severe blood loss and swelling, or edema. The nurse was looking at a corpse with its heart still beating.

No matter what, the surgeons tried to save her. Even when it won’t work, they try. The only exception to the head wound rule comes after a firefight. Medics in the field mark the casualty “expectant” and handle as well as medevac those who can be saved first. It sounds cold, but lives get saved, the ones who can be saved, as opposed to sacrificing one for a soldier who is basically already gone. Forget pulse and respiration; they stopped being who they were when the round from an AK-47 turned their brain into gray bits mixed with blood.

But for 36 hours, doctors worked on the woman. She was in ICU and the OR several times.

The young nurse went home and told her mother it wasn’t good. To this day she knew that she had worked on a dying woman. The time finally came for doctors to call time of death: 17:22 EDT.

The couple, Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, had been parked in a Brooklyn lover’s lane. It was their first date. Those situations were how the .44 Caliber Killer always struck. Couples parked, bothering no one, hearts full of the pangs of love. And now he had done so in Brooklyn.

Between the summers of 1976 and 1977, but actually beginning in late 1975, the killer had terrorized all of New York City. Police were taunted by letters from him and by August 1977, he knew exactly where to go to avoid a 300-man task force and their dragnet. And he had just targeted his first blonde-haired woman. Not his M.O., but it shows that he intended to keep killing. He was never going to stop.

They turned out to be the final victims of serial killer David Berkowitz, a k.a. the .44 Caliber Killer. Best known as: Son of Sam.

He was captured by police a short time later and said, as if it meant nothing, “Well, you got me.”

He was confined to Kings County Hospital for psychiatric observation. The Nurse was there when they brought him in. She was watching through the glass, concealed but able to see and hear.

Her first sight of him made her blood run cold. What she cannot forget is the smirk he wore on his face: here was pure evil encased in a human body. He was deemed competent to stand trial three times. He was tried, convicted of second degree murder and attempted second degree murder. He pleaded guilty. The sentence: 25 to life.

He did time in Attica and Sing Sing.

He survived a murder attempt. Then he became an evangelical Christian. He cannot use a computer but other evangelicals maintain a website for him. Why, I don’t know. He’s been the subject of documentaries and has been allowed interviews. He gets no royalties but has published. He is not being punished. He is being coddled.

The injustice of it sickens me.

In Baltimore there’s a history of prosecutors refusing to try violent perpetrators. Guns are an even bigger problem now than ever. Street violence is a plague, an epidemic. There’s little you or I can do about it. Until mayors and prosecutors do their jobs, the police won’t do theirs. And when things are that bad, chaos and death rule every day.

While serial-and-mass murderers get headlines decades after either being killed, caught or escaping, it is the everyman or everywoman most at risk from gun crimes. And we do nothing but make videos, watch the news while we eat dinner and we don’t even belch.

I used to see very graphic footage on local news channels. The anchors would warn that it could be disturbing. Instead it numbed a nation of barbarians. People didn’t care.

***

The Rise of the Barbarians did not begin with the Son of Sam. Nor with the “Manson Family”. It cannot be pinned to any date, any place. Certainly not with any one person. We can trace certain things through Ancestry and written history, but we can only go so far with either. All we can do is pin certain places to certain times and notable people.

When Europe first began sending immigrants to “America”, they were not sending their best people. They were sending rapists and murderers. The settlement of an already occupied land turned the very soil red with blood. The world has never been the same.

Being aware of Ancient Greece and Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Asian nations, mostly loosely associated with allies but always at war, we cannot claim that North America is the beginning of Barbarians. But we certainly have followed their path. I have roots in Belgium, Germany, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. There were ancestors on the Maflower. Daniel Boone was my 6th great uncle. Some later fought for both sides in the Civil War. Some fought in just about every war the United States has waged. Relatives fought the British in the Revolutionary War while others fought in red coats. Same as the War of 1812. None of this makes any sense to me. It should not make any sense to anyone.

History is not pretty. While videos like documentaries are sometimes good, most are laden with traps like conspiracy theories and outright misinformation.

But never in history have we been more barbaric than we are right now. You can try to point to something particular in history; an event that changed everything, like August 6, 1945, the single bomb that shook the world. You’d have a valid point. But not the only one. You can argue, but then you would be using a narrow view. History does not tolerate that.

No one really knows who developed the first war ships. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians had a fearsome fleet. Sparta may have won, but the seas ran red. It was costly. Egypt fought many wars and conquered part of the western Middle East. By the time of the reign of Cleopatra, the pyramids were already ruins. Rome invaded and the once mighty Egypt was occupied, as had been Greece. Rome, like Egypt and Greece, inherited and improved weapons and war tactics. To see legions marching toward you was to know true fear. The Spanish decimated Central America. Warfare was constantly being refined and improved upon. Killing was what fed the people.

By the middle ages armor and weapons had not progressed much. Swords, spears, halberds, shields and bows had been strengthened and catapults refined as trebuchets which when aligned in groups were terrifying. The castle became obsolete, but Alexander the Great had already defeated many fixed fortifications with siege towers. Now, armies could lay waste from a distance. That’s as far as the progress went. Until gunpowder.

It wasn’t until World War I that true mass butchery with artillery, machine guns, and mustard gas was possible. Death by the numbers. Shelling drove men mad. The old saying “Never light three on a match” was said because by the time three cigarettes were lit, nighttime snipers had acquired a target. Either rifle or machine gun fire would tear through them and anyone close.

The saying became a superstition popularized just after the war ended. Some believe it came from World War Two but the superstition was already well known.

The bloody war taught nobody anything. The Treaty of Versailles was so hard on Germany that Hitler took it as an excuse to build the military in violation of it. Every part of that Treaty was adhered to, like dead tonnage in naval vessels, by the west. Not Germany. The slow speeds and thin armor of new ships off the line and the restriction that caused obsolete ships to remain in service, not to mention aircraft, made Pearl Harbor possible. It also indirectly led to unnecessary casualties by the Allies in the first years of the war in Europe and the Pacific.

Even by the Battle of Midway, torpedo bombers, the TBD-1 Devastator, were shot out of the sky. They were slow, easy targets. Even if one got through the screen of Japanese fighter planes and anti-aircraft fire, the torpedoes rarely even exploded.

So the Allies learned very quickly to adapt. By war’s end, the United States had the most fearsome navy the world had ever seen. So many fast carriers were without a job that they were mothballed. Heavy carriers were still being scrapped in the 1990s. I actually saw the mighty USS Bunker Hill being taken apart. Every day, the hulk got smaller until I could not even see it. She was a big part of the war in the Pacific. She was also my favorite.

But the atomic age rendered her useless.

That doesn’t mean we are any less barbaric. Now we have huge carriers able to launch planes that can refuel in the air and fire missiles with a range of miles or bomb a target with incredible precision. Helicopter rescuers are able to save pilots who had to eject over water. In World War Two and Korea that was rare.

***

It is a clear picture of barbarism that as Russians pulled back to Kyiv, they left evidence behind that shocked the world. Bodies of women and children and non-combatants lay in the streets. Some shot, others garotted, some strangled by bare hands. I don’t need to read that women were raped first. I know.

Russia’s attack and invasion of Ukraine has been condemned around the world. But the people of Ukraine fight alone. Sanctions against Russia are a pitiful response and everyone believes that anything more will start World War Three. It may. Reports have it that Putin is isolated, his leaders afraid to tell him anything. That he is also unstable.

No matter how that war ends, it won’t be the last. No matter how we restrict gun sales, the killing will not stop. Police are afraid to do their jobs. They walk a beat or get out of a cruiser and things are thrown at them. Cell phone cameras do not show provocation but instead the users wait desperately to catch them doing anything wrong. Some neighborhoods can’t get an emergency response because the police are targets and can’t go in without lots of backup. The news will not report this. Yet it happens to be more true every day. If I were 18, the last choice I would make for a career is law enforcement.

Law and order are being taken from us. Violence rules the streets, with gangs everywhere. Republicans don’t prosecute their own.

Otherwise, people treat each other with diminishing respect. We’ve become hardened; numb and suspicious.

When the Roman Empire used the noun “barbarians” it simply meant people other than Roman citizens. Today it means people who are not civilized or are evil. People like Son of Sam. The Sandy Hook shooter. The Parkland shooter. The Vegas sniper.

People like evangelical, rich preachers are evil. They lead the masses to falsely believe that tithing will prompt God to help them get rich. It won’t; you have to be a sociopathic scammer for that. Murders, wars and thievery in God’s name is an abomination. Period.

We are killers, pedophiles and rapists, drug dealers and pimps, pirates, scammers, liars; barbarians.

Imagine breaking a bone and not having insurance, or inadequate plans. The bills will bury you. Now picture needing surgery to pin bones back together. You’re going to be hounded by nasty phone calls and bills that keep on coming. Then they ruin your credit score.

That’s not even the worst of it. Imagine now that you’re sent home without a prescription for pain, that the doctor tells you to take Advil. It takes 8 weeks, sometimes longer, for a break to mend. That’s if you’re not diabetic. Then who knows when it will stop hurting. Imagine watching a relative suffering from cancer with no narcotics. They’re going to die and the doctor won’t prescribe a pain killer because “those are addictive“!

You ever heard a gunshot victim screaming in pain? Once you do, you will never forget it. Ever seen someone gut-shot, their intestines all over the ground? If they’re lucky they pass out. Multiple surgeries follow, a colostomy, perhaps permanent. Always in pain. How about a spinal injury? Even a compressed disk is excruciating and no bones are even broken. Your every move hurts. They send you home with muscle relaxers so weak that you can’t feel any relief and that does not even treat the real problem.

The “opiod crisis” never existed. People who overdosed mixed meds or also drank died. It wasn’t suicide. It was accidental most of the time; pain can be so intense that one can forget a dose was taken or else be desperate.

The main advantage of opiates for pain is that if you are in very severe pain, taking it on schedule can prevent it from getting too intense. Once it’s at that point, your medicine isn’t as effective. But enough about that. Let’s talk progressive and liberal politicians. While arguing for better Healthcare they bitched about opiates. You see the problem? I contacted my representative. I’ve called out politicians and activists on Twitter. Friends have shared the link to my petition on Facebook and Instagram. It is not going well. My tweet about losing my son went to 50,800 likes, and now comments are being deleted. I get more likes every day, more people share horror stories and no one I’ve tagged has even bothered to respond. Not even activists. The likes topped off at 50.8k likes. I don’t think Twitter likes it at all. I took attention away from the war, the pandemic and Will Smith.

But this part of our existence is the final proof. We are barbarians. We’re going backwards and nobody notices. They believe politicians and documentaries over science and human rights. In an age when we can treat pain we are refused treatment.

If that surprises you, look at the shameful way children are abused and neglected with abusers rarely being held accountable.

Doctor Pedo

A pediatrician in Delaware used to insist that infants and toddlers be seen without the parents present. He was raping them. How any parent ever allowed this unsupervised doctor to treat their children is beyond me but he wasn’t questioned and it went on for a long time. One father said, “I was in the waiting room reading People Magazine while he was raping my daughter.” He lamented that he wasn’t much of a father.

I have to agree with him there. Doctor Earl Bradley was not a child molester. He was a serial child rapist. I’m going to give you a link. But be warned: it is graphic, horrible and will trigger people.

Dr. Earl Bradley sentenced to life without parole

You see a picture of a man whose looks betray the monster within. Filthy, disheveled, offensive.

I use this article after reading and being much more than triggered. But take note here, and make no mistake: other doctors knew. They said nothing to authorities and joked about him at cocktail parties. They made jokes! The first detective who worked a case involving him was told by the Attorney General that he couldn’t do anything. Investigation stopped there. The rapes continued while victims’ parents tried to warn others away. They were called liars and nuts. Once you read how he got caught and convicted, you will come away wondering how often this happens. The article claims child abuse by doctors is rare. Well, it isn’t. The victims are traumatized and cannot articulate what happened. Sex abuse and rape is more common to adults. So they claim. I contend that nobody can know that for certain and the claim is invalid. This animal got away with his crimes for years.

The one thing you must take from this is who the victims are, and the list of more potential victims keeps growing. In Florida, banning any mention in schools about the LGBTQ community is a setting for death. It means nutty anti-LGBTQ haters can declare open season amongst themselves. In Ohio, as Ohio does, the same law is being taken up. In Oklahoma all abortions are now illegal, with no exceptions save for the mother’s life being in danger. Doctors can get ten years, pay a 100,000 dollar fine and lose their medical license. Oklahoma is a poor state. Most red states are. If a woman is raped she can’t even get a morning after pill. The poor cannot travel out of state and still afford medical procedures. If you agree that we are a nation of barbarians, stand by. Much worse will follow. The hatred of women is out of its cage. It can’t be reined in. Not that there really was a cage; now though, it’s going to be everywhere, more open and much more lethal.

You see how Republicans stick together no matter what. You see that they want a swastika flying at the White House. You see how doctors cover for each other. They will not counter another doctor’s refusal to give pain meds to those who clearly need it. They tell you “your pain is all in your mind” and they can’t get rid of your file fast enough and move on to someone else. Cookie cutter healthcare with sadism from top to bottom.

You can say whatever you like. When the time comes, and it’s your turn to hurt, what will you do? Pain brings the toughest and most stubborn to their knees in tears. I’ve seen it.

***

The nurse remembers one more thing from the night Stacy Moskowitz was brought to Kings County Hospital. The mother.

Mrs. Moskowitz was heartbreaking to see. The nurse will never forget the wailing and plaintive words she screamed. She was the last true victim of Son of Sam. She never recovered.

I want to fight for women’s rights. For LGBTQ rights and protection. But I had to start somewhere. One thing at a time. So my petition at change.org is for doctors to treat pain properly. To be a patient and expect to be treated properly. Many can be saved. Pain or suicide is a sadistic choice to give anyone. We need the people to rejoin society and we have no right keeping them from it.

Sign this, and give me–give us–hope.

https://chng.it/2zjLYVYm