More thoughts

June 15, 2008

About 3 this morning I watch a show on PBS on an Albino Gorilla name snow flake. Very cute Gorilla. It amazed me on 40 years we went from not knowing much about gorillas to knowing so much about them. Thanks to some people who went into the jungles and live with them. Can you imagine living in a jungle to study them? Poor snow flake died of skin cancer in 2003.

After than I watched a documentary on Sir Issac Newton Interesting.. From watching the show I started to think about how many smart people are very introverted and sensitive people. He went into hiding because of one person criticizes about research that he publish. The show mostly talked about his interest in alchemy which is a precursor to modern chemistry. He thought myths from Greece were recipes to alchemy.
Most of all he really just like researching. I can relate to that. I wanted to go into the research sector in archeology. I don't have much interested in teaching and neither did Newton. I love science even though I didn't make the best grades. His love for math though I cant relate to because I don't like math much. Even though math and science go together. When I was learning Algebra I wanted to smack the shit out the person who invented Algebra. I'm sure there are some calculus students who feel that way about Newton. The father of Calculus.

June 12, 2008

 DELAVAN — A year ago today, the plain white house on a tree-lined street was a grisly crime scene bordered by yellow police tape.

Six were dead inside the upstairs apartment at 309 S. Second St.

The 911 call came in at 10:36 p.m.

“I was inside of my house, and my sister-in-law, her boyfriend, came in and started shooting everybody,” the lone witness told the dispatcher.

“Could you please hurry up please?” he pleaded.

Ambrosio Analco, 23, killed himself after he shot and killed his estranged girlfriend Nicole McAffee, 19; their infant twin sons, Argenis and Isaiah Analco; Nicole’s sister Ashley Lynn Huerta, 21; and Nicole and Ashley’s friend Vanessa Iverson, 19.

Sgt. Todd Wiese of the Delavan Police Department will never forget.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t drive up that street and look at that house and think about what happened,” he said.

A golden thread

Police stormed the house with weapons drawn, but in the driveway Deputy Kirk Dodge of the Walworth County SWAT Team noticed a baby inside a minivan. He took the girl from her car seat and ran her a half-block down the street, where Wiese was waiting.

The little girl looked up at him with brown eyes but didn’t make a sound—“not even a whimper,” he said.

A streetlight shone a glow just bright enough that Wiese could see blood covering the little girl’s pajamas.

“And then it became real,” said the father of two young children. “It’s tough. You prepare for it all the time, but you’re never expecting it.”

Wiese carried the girl to his squad car parked at the corner of Second and Matthew streets. He laid her on the trunk and used a knife to cut off her shirt, revealing a bullet hole in her chest.

Still the little girl didn’t cry.

“There wasn’t any other indication she was in pain other than the obvious wound to her chest,” Wiese told The Janesville Gazette days after the incident.

Not knowing if the shooter still was in the area, Wiese drove his squad car east down Matthew Street as Deputy P.J. Austin of the SWAT team walked quickly behind, holding the girl so she wouldn’t fall off the trunk of the car.

They met an ambulance waiting a block away, and the girl was rushed to a hospital.

The little girl—Jasmine Analco, now almost 3 years old—is the unbreakable “golden thread” of hope that led the community out of a terrifying tragedy.

“There’s been a lot of healing,” said Delavan Police Chief Tim O’Neill in a recent interview.

Horror and dismay

When the SWAT team emerged from the house, they stood in shock, staring into space, biting their lips and fighting back tears, Walworth County Sheriff David Graves told the Gazette days after the incident.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of look on their faces,” he said. “The horror and the dismay I saw on their faces that night was incredible.”

When Graves learned six bodies were inside, including two infant twin boys who “looked like dolls in that chair,” he called in the sheriff’s department psychologist, who gave officers a chance to talk about the incident.

“It makes the team stronger,” Graves said. “It’s tough, especially seeing something like this … but I think it brings them closer together.”

The officers were warned not to get too close to the family, O’Neill said.

But for those who arrived first at the scene and encountered the little girl shot in the chest, it wasn’t easy.

“It’s difficult because you do have a connection there,” Wiese said in a recent interview. “It’s not easy, but you kind of take it with everything else that comes.”

But it’s a connection he’ll never lose, he said.

“She obviously lost some family that evening, but I think she gained a lot of family in return,” Wiese told the Gazette days after the incident. “She has a lot more family (now) than she initially did. (She has lots of uncles on the department who are going to adopt her, for lack of a better term.”

Jasmine was adopted by family members, said Nicole’s aunt Karen “Dee Dee” Sittler of Elkhorn.

Wiese said when he last saw Jasmine she was laughing, talking and playing like most almost-3-year-old girls.

“She’s doing fine,” Sittler said.

“It’s been really a difficult, difficult, difficult year. We’re just trying to make our life somewhat normal again.”