This sad case was all over the news here yesterday.

Dallas police said a man allegedly beat his ex-wife to death at her workplace and then threatened to jump from a bridge on the George Bush Turnpike in Carrollton.

38-year-old Brent Stephens went to an office building in the 12000 block of Hillcrest Road and waited for 36-year-old Denise Stephens to show up Monday morning, according to police.

Investigators said he beat her with a baseball bat in front of several witnesses. She was rushed to Medical City Hospital, but died shortly after from her injuries.

The print version on the Fox 4 website doesn’t go into the same detail as the video, so it’s not listed in the print version, but the video goes into detail on the history of Denise Stephens’ separation and divorce from Brent Stephens, including both temporary and permanent restraining orders. 

Unfortunately, I think sometimes people put too much stock in restraining orders.  They aren’t a magical shield which will protect someone from a determined attacker.  The restraining order in this instance was apparently no deterrent to the deranged ex-husband.  And while restraining orders disqualify someone from owning guns, we can see in this instance that there are other no-less deadly weapons that are readily available to anyone in just about every department store.

One lesson to take from this is to remember that a baseball bat can be a deadly weapon and should be treated as such in a self-defense scenario (i.e. if you come at me with a baseball bat, I will shoot you).  The second is that you’re on your own during the initial stage of an attack.  Situational awareness and possessing the appropriate tools to respond to the situation could save your life.  I suspect that if Ms. Stephens had been armed that she’d still be here today (and, perhaps, given the situation awareness required for someone while carrying a gun, may even have escaped unharmed).

I’ve often wondered whether someone from work sneaked into my office and wired my chair into the instant messaging system.  There are times when I can sit here for two hours and not be bothered, but 5 minutes after I get up to take a break (or if I go to lunch) someone sends me a message. 

I’ve checked for wires, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t put a wireless tracker on it.  Maybe I should wrap my chair (and perhaps myself) in tinfoil? 

A while back I was commiserating with a friend of mine about how I seem to spend all my work time talking about the work that’s going to be done, but no time actually doing it.  I recently took stock of my calendar, and determined that my “base” meeting load is 18 hours per week.  That represents regularly scheduled checkpoints, status meetings, technical discussions, and administrivia.  It doesn’t count one-off meetings called to discuss new projects, hot issues, or to ameliorate the meeting chairperson’s loneliness.  It also doesn’t count double-bookings, which if rescheduled, would make things worse.

I suppose this would be a non-issue if my primary job task was to attend meetings.  But my employers seem to have this strange idea that I might deliver design documents and even the occasional batch of code from time to time.  I’ve worked both of the last two weekends trying to catch up with a project that has been neglected because of all the meetings and there may be light at the end of the tunnel in a week or so.  Of course, by then, some new hot topic will interrupt my regular work and derail things again. 

Anyhow, the “free ice cream” will be delayed for a bit longer while I brandish the chair and whip until the tigers are tamed (or at least shoved back into their cages). 

You can observe a lot by just watching.
—Yogi Berra

My last post about stupid drivers has me thinking about safety of late, so it seemed fortuitous that Instapundit pointed out these tips for better driving from Motor Trend.  While most of them are great for controlling the vehicle smoothly, I think that perhaps the most important lesson is about simply looking ahead:

3. Look ahead. Nope, not at the car in front of you. No, not at the car in front of him, either. I want you looking as far down the road as you can. On a mountain road, you’re not looking at the corner you’re in, you’re looking for the next one. On the highway, your eyes are scanning the horizon, often a half-mile or more down the road. On the track, you’re always looking where you want to go.

This one thing, if practiced on a regular basis, can save you from a multitude of troubles.  And it’s taught, albeit in different forms, in just about all driver safety courses.  When I took the MSF couse, it was described as SIPDE (Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide, Execute) and they had you scanning 4 seconds ahead for immediate dangers, as well as 12 seconds ahead for potential dangers.  When I took CEVO II, it was encapsulated in the concept of the “cushion of safety.”  Another good approach, as taken in Drive to Survive, is to equate it to Jeff Cooper’s states of situational awareness, with Condition Yellow being the optimal normal driving condition. 

If you’re not going to be operating a motorcycle (MSF) or an emergency vehicle (CEVO), then I recommend Drive to Survive, with the warning that you should probably ignore the sections on bootlegger turns and the like (unless you’re driving a limo for a diplomat or executive in a high-risk situation).  But his advice on steering wheel grip/hand placement (I grimace when I see some of you out there with your hands turned upside down and across the wheel while making a turn), awareness, and mirror adjustment have made me a much safer driver than I was before I was “reformed.”  I can say that simple situational awareness (driving in Condition Yellow) has saved me from several incidents that I would have just blundered into if I had been unaware.  And I’m fairly certain that if I’d been practicing them much earlier I would have avoided the two collisions that I have been involved with.  In both instances it involved another driver who failed to obey a traffic control device (one ran a stop sign, another a red light).  While I was not technically at fault in either instance, I now know that they could have been avoided if I’d been paying better attention.  And I’d certainly rather have avoided them, rather than to just be able to say after the fact that I wasn’t at fault.  Anyhow, the last one was in 1995, so perhaps the techniques have been helpful in the interim.

I’m not perfect, and it requires constant attention to follow these techniques, but I certainly try.  And even if you follow these techniques to the letter, there’s no guarantee that you won’t be involved in a collision.  Hell, no amount of observation is going to help you if a cow falls out of the sky onto your vehicle.  Still, though, I think we’d be a lot better off if people would just simply look where they’re going, and not just at the taillights of the car in front of them.  I suspect, though, that the people who really need these lessons aren’t interested in hearing them yet.  Unfortunately, it usually takes a serious incident to get their attention.

In the post below I mentioned a previous encounter that I had with some people who vandalized the football field in Pilot Point.  This quickly brought a comment from one of the people in question.  In light of the subject matter of the post below, I have decided to move the comments out of the comment section and into a post of their own.

Here’s the comment:

You just don’t get the message we were trying to get across. We didn’t have a problem with teachers, coaches, cops, football, basketball, Pilot Point, or even Celina. Our beef was with parents. Our high school experience was ruined by the parents of the town quarreling over irrelevant things. We acted out against parents in general because all the attention was on them, it is the same stuff you hear about everyday where parents get too involved in their child’s sports and sometimes they take it a step further and try to live vicariously not only through sports, but through friends, classes, dates, parties, and so on and so on.

We chose that prank because it was a clean prank, no one got hurt and all damages could be fixed with relative ease. Most importantly, well to us anyways, it put the proverbial cherry on top of the cake because the town and school was going down hill with e-mail controversies, recruiting allegations, teaching scandals, and parents fighting. Our parents got so wrapped up trying to be us that they forgot who they were, I mean it was like “Hey mom, dad, get out of my school, you can squash your beef with Johnny’s parents at the flag pole after school at 4, but for now go home and let me go to class.”

And as far as us being whiney and not wanting to accept responsibility for our actions, it was a perfect prank, no witnesses, no fingerprints, no evidence. The cops blatantly ignored our Miranda Rights, we were removed from the school which doesn’t constitute a stop, but we were not arrested or read rights, instead the police said that we didn’t have time to contact an attorney or our parents, we could turn ourselves in right then and there or go to jail. If we gave our statements admitting guilt then they said they would not arrest us, but before we gave our statements we had to sign off on our Miranda Rights and the last right on the paper was “I was not coerced into an admission of guilt by the threat of jail time” we didn’t sign that right or the right to remain silent and the rights to attorneys. Anyways the police will do what the police want to do. And don’t come back on me with any guff saying that police are fair, good people. Those same police were later arrested for soliciting sex from a minor.

We accepted our consequences with the school. We missed prom, received three days suspension, paid full restitution, and volunteered our time to repaint the entire football stadium during our suspension. In restitution we paid the school for seven people to repaint at $8 an hour for 24 hours, five of those seven were us and the other two were school maintenance men who brought us paint in the morning. So that is $1340 that we paid the school to have us come volunteer our services while we were not allowed on school grounds by law because we were suspended. And even though we were volunteers we were told when we had to be there, when and where we could go for lunch, and when we could leave.

All of that was shady, but we did it because the superintendent promised a letter promising that the ISD would not press criminal charges. Now I’m assuming that you think that we are whiny brats because of the Steve Stoler interview where we said that there was double jeopardy, and while I don’t so much agree with the double jeopardy statement I do think that what led to us going to jail was fubar. To this day no one can tell us who called for us to be sent to jail, all we know was it was a school board member. What we do know is that there was one board member that doesn’t favor two of us who have parents on the board or running for the board, her position on the board to be more precise. She was very vocal about her dislike for us, and right after our suspension was up and we were back in school her freshman kid was caught with a water bottle full of vodka. Her response to the school is that if here kid is getting expelled for a little alcohol then we needed to go to jail.

In the PPISD code of conduct books it states that PPISD has zero tolerance for drugs and alcohol they are a level 4 offence that merit immediate expulsion, our infringement, vandalism is a level 2 offence that will result in a maximum of 3 days in ISS or in school suspension. We had already gone far past what the school district itself called for because we were promised no jail. At the end of the day an anonymous school board member pressed criminal charges on the five of us and we went to jail.

In conclusion, we are not whiny, were pissed because after all the smoke cleared parents still acted like children but realized that they were children with more authority.

Posted by VandalFromPilotPoint on 01/29/2008 at 01:17 PM

I had one interim comment, with my reaction to the speed of the first comment, but here is my second comment with the “meat” of my response:

Our high school experience was ruined by the parents of the town quarreling over irrelevant things. We acted out against parents in general because all the attention was on them, it is the same stuff you hear about everyday where parents get too involved in their child’s sports and sometimes they take it a step further and try to live vicariously not only through sports, but through friends, classes, dates, parties, and so on and so on.

Somehow, this message fails to move me.  It also does *not* justify pulling this “prank” (as you call it).

And don’t come back on me with any guff saying that police are fair, good people. Those same police were later arrested for soliciting sex from a minor.

Guff?  Interesting tone to take with me if you’re trying to persuade me that you were railroaded.  Anyhow, the police that I know *personally* are generally fair, good people.  Not to say that there aren’t some bad ones I’ve encountered.  But it’s a bit far-fetched to judge them all based on your small sample.

At the end of the day an anonymous school board member pressed criminal charges on the five of us and we went to jail.

That’s an interesting statement, and I don’t see how it can be true.  You have the right to confront your accuser in court, so I suspect what really happened here is that the DA decided to pursue the charges, which is within his purview.  It matters not whether the ISD wants to press charges (although in some cases this could be a mitigating circumstance).

As for double-jeopardy, it doesn’t seem to apply (as you noted), as the criminal justice system didn’t attempt to try you twice.

Anyhow, after reading your statement, I remain unmoved with regards to any justification for your actions or the punishments you received.  The simple solution to the whole thing would have been not pulling the prank.  It’s amazing that this escapes you, but perhaps someday when you’re older you’ll understand.

I’m probably going to piss off somebody (more on this below) with this post, but so be it.  Here’s the background:

ROANOKE—A man and a 2-year-old girl were killed late Sunday when their vehicle was hit head-on by a car trying to pass in a no-passing zone, police said. The driver of the car was also killed, officials said.

The man’s wife was critically injured in the crash and remained in intensive care Monday, officials said.

The accident was reported about 9 p.m. in the 2200 block of U.S. 377, near Schooling Road on the north side of the city, police said.

The toddler’s name was not released, Roanoke police Capt. Robert Crawford said.

Joshua Adkison, 24, of Virginia Beach, Va., who was traveling with the girl, was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

Kristina Adkison, 24, also of Virginia Beach, was taken by helicopter to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Crawford said.

Police did not release the relationship between the Adkisons and the toddler.

The driver of the other car was Rachele Mahanna Bowman, 29, of Southlake, who was traveling alone, Crawford said.

She was also pronounced dead at the scene, he said.

The accident

Police said the collision occurred as Bowman was driving south on U.S. 377 trying to pass a vehicle driven by Jolene Owen, 47, of Haslet.

Bowman’s car collided head-on with the Adkisons’ northbound vehicle, police said.

The two cars also struck Owen’s sport utility vehicle, police said.

Owen, who was alone in her car, was taken to Presbyterian Hospital of Denton, where she was treated and released, Crawford said.

For some reason, this one bothered me more than most accidents I hear about.  Mostly I just ignore them, but maybe because I still drive this road from time to time, and I used to drive it on a daily basis, it hit closer to home for me.  It happened on the north side of Roanoke, near the side-road that leads to the sand pit (or whatever it is back there; there’s also an old sign for some kind of subdivision there).  This is just after the point where the speed limit drops from 65 down to 50 and as you enter the Roanoke city limits. 

I don’t know if anyone else experiences the same thing, but each road (or section of road) has a specific “feel” to me, based on my perceived sense of safety (which is the result of a complex mental calculation that takes into account the condition of the road, the number and type of side-streets and entrances / exits, sight lines, and number of idiots per linear mile).  This road (highway 377) gives me a strong sense of danger from 1171 (Flower Mound) all the way down to Keller.  As I mentioned, the speed limit slows as you enter Roanoke, so you have to deal with a combination of impatient idiots who tailgate along with fairly strict enforcement by Roanoke (they like to hang out in the vicinity of this accident site and nail speeders who aren’t obeying the new speed limit).  You have a (newish) subdivision that has lots of people pulling out into the road, then, just after it widens to two lanes each way, there’s the Wal-Mart—Home Depot complex (thank goodness they finally got a light at Marshall Creek, although this only seems to make it marginally safer, as idiots still dart out of Wal-Mart across both lanes of traffic).  As if this wasn’t enough, then you have the intersection with 114.  Finally, if you manage to make it through all of this, the road narrows again down to two lanes as you cross the bridge over the “old” 114 (there is no room for last-minute merging idiots here).

So, given all the above, what it appears we have here is an impatient (and now dead) idiot attempting to pass a driver who was obeying the speed limit in a no-passing zone and who has managed to kill a man and his child, along with severely injuring his wife. 

As someone who tries very hard to drive defensively and carefully, this sort of behavior bothers me on an almost visceral level.  I think perhaps this is because it represents a criminal selfishness on the part of these idiots.  They are so wrapped up in their own desires that they forget that their actions have effects on others.  I think that in general, people just don’t take driving seriously enough.  I see people yakking on cell phones (generally indicated by a failure to control speed or failure to maintain a single lane), doing makeup, reading, tailgating, etc and it makes it obvious to me that they don’t understand that they’re at the controls of a potential death machine.  The amount of energy involved in even a slow-speed crash is enormous, and it’s amazingly easy to get someone killed through a half-second of carelessness. 

Anyhow, I learned a long time ago that making things personal while driving, or being in a hurry, don’t do any good other than to raise my blood pressure.  I used to be the type to weave in and out of traffic, always seeking to get ahead.  But after I calmed down and slowed down a bit, I learned that it wasn’t really worth it.  The only place where that sort of driving makes any difference is on long Interstate trips.  Anywhere else it just aggravates everyone.  I now take pleasure in pulling up next to a speeding jackass at the next light, knowing that I’ve only arrived two or three seconds later, but much more safely and with much less hassle.

Finally, as I mentioned above, I’m probably going to piss someone off with this post.  I’ve seen it in the past where someone related to the subject of my post starts Googling and finds what I’ve written.  In the heat of the moment they fire off an angry missive to defend their relative’s honor and to hopefully get me to retract or take down my post (and get the incriminating evidence out of Google).  My response to these situations is to break out the popcorn and post their missives, along with my response, because this just increases the relevance in Google and makes them look even worse.  For example, this happened in the Lindsey Crumpton case, and with some vandals from Pilot Point.  In this instance, unless someone can show me evidence that this driver did not pass in a no-passing zone, the I will stand by my assessment that Rachele Mahanna Bowman, 29, of Southlake, was a deadly idiot.

Update:  Here’s a link to a video on WFAA that shows the situation in a fair amount of detail:  link to video .  Also of interest in that clip is an interview with the City Manager, who acknowledged that some of the intersections in Roanoke feel like “death traps.”  I’m glad to see someone else feels the same as I do…

Spring is approaching again here in North Texas, and with spring comes the threat of severe weather.  The National Weather Service Forecast Office in Ft. Worth has begun its spring Skywarn training series, with 49 sessions available throughout the area between now and April 8th (10 of which also include advanced spotter training).

The full schedule is available from the NWS website: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/fwd/sptrsch.html 

For those that may not be familiar with Skywarn, here’s how I described it the last time:

So just what is SKYWARN and why would you be interested?

SKYWARN is a volunteer program established by NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) in partnership with other organizations.  According to NOAA, “SKYWARN has nearly 280,000 trained severe weather spotters,” and “these volunteers help keep their local communities safe by providing timely and accurate reports of severe weather to the National Weather Service.”

While that might sound kind of intimidating, SKYWARN training is valuable for anyone who lives in North Texas whether they wish to participate in storm spotting activities or not.  The basic SKYWARN class covers:

• Basics of thunderstorm development
• Fundamentals of storm structure
• Identifying potential severe weather features
• Information to report
• How to report information
• Basic severe weather safety

I’ve been to both the basic and advanced SKYWARN training, and while I don’t go chase storms, it’s helped me quite a bit in understanding when I should worry about a particular storm and which areas are most dangerous in such a storm.

So I see that there is a writer’s strike under way.  Normally I couldn’t be arsed to care much about it.  However, if it affects the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica, I’m going to have to go down there and get medieval on somebody with a rubber hose.

I saw this WSJ article last month when it was referenced by Dr. Helen.  It came to my mind again because of something that happened as I was leaving the vet’s office yesterday afternoon.

When children get lost in a mall, they’re supposed to find a “low-risk adult” to help them. Guidelines issued by police departments and child-safety groups often encourage them to look for “a pregnant woman,” “a mother pushing a stroller” or “a grandmother.”

The implied message: Men, even dads pushing strollers, are “high-risk.”

Are we teaching children that men are out to hurt them? The answer, on many fronts, is yes. Child advocate John Walsh advises parents to never hire a male babysitter. Airlines are placing unaccompanied minors with female passengers rather than male passengers. Soccer leagues are telling male coaches not to touch players.

A woman had parked her Tahoe next to my Avalanche and was in the process of unloading her kids when I exited the office with Malcom.  He was a bit stressed,  so I took him into the grass next to the office for a minute to let him sniff around and get calmed down.  The lady got the first child into a stroller and pushed it up over the curb onto the sidewalk and went back to get the second child.  The sidewalk has a slight incline and I noticed the stroller start rolling backwards towards the curb and I was certain it would tip over if it got that far.  I ran towards it and yelled at the woman about the stroller.  But as I went I couldn’t help but think about the fact that I was an adult male running towards a stroller with a child in it.  Fortunately, the woman saw what was happening and got to it before I did, and she didn’t react badly. 

Am I overreacting?  I don’t think so, considering that just the accusation of some sort of inappropriate conduct with a child is enough to completely ruin a man’s life these days.  And I hate that it’s come to this.  Men are afraid to interact with children who aren’t related (and sometimes even if they are), and children are growing up sensing that men are uncomfortable around them, which probably damages them in some way or another.

I don’t know how we get out of this hole we’ve dug for ourselves, though.  Just that we need to do something different.

Lately I’ve been reading Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series.  I’ve especially enjoyed the reprints of some of the older books, as they kept the original language and spelling (even with the occasionally inscrutable Scottish phrase).  It really came home to me as I was reading Fleshmarket Alley and realized that it had been completely Americanized (including the title; it was originally published as Fleshmarket Close, “close” being a Scottish term for an alley).  After learning the correct spelling for Scotch Whisky, it’s especially jarring to see it repeatedly spelled as “whiskey.”  (And, given the proclivities of Inspector Rebus, it’s used quite often.)  If I’d given it any thought when ordering, I’d have gone out of my way to find the original (which appears to be available through Amazon marketplace, but not Amazon.com/US directly).

In the past I’ve even gone so far as to order directly from Amazon UK to get original editions.  It’s a bit more expensive, given the international shipping and exchange rates.  But, especially for new releases, it’s the only way to get an unadulterated version.