I REMEMBER THE DAY OF THE MURDER

I was a youth pastor in Hollister, California when news of this grisly murder reached me. However, the murder was only part of the utter shock that hit me. Please notice the parts that I have put in bold. This is from a New York Times article relating to the California crime.


HEADLINE: YOUTHS' SILENT ON MURDER VICTIM LEAVES A CALIFORNIA TOWN BAFFLED
By WAYNE KING, Special to the New York Times
DATELINE: MILPITAS, Calif., Dec. 10

To Detective Sgt. Garry Meeker of the Santa Clara Sheriff's Department, it was not the killing of 14-yearold Marcy Renee Conrad that was so unusual, at least not these days.
''Not the crime itself,'' said the 42-year-old sergeant, who has been a police officer all his working life, like his father before him. ''The unusual aspect was what followed, the kids going up there. That was the unusual aspect.''

At that, he said, it was only the extremity of the crime, the strangulation of a young girl, that made the callousness and silence of the teen-agers so out of the ordinary. For two days they had gone up into the hills by the carload, as if on an outing, to take a look at the body lying half naked in the woods.

''Even the straightest kid in school knows which kid is dealing dope; they don't care or want to get involved,'' Sergeant Meeker said. ''They know all the stuff that's going down. You take the straightest, straight-A, civic-minded student in that school, he's going to know all that, and he's not going to tell.''

''But when it reaches the point of murder,'' he said, making a small gesture of futility, ''I mean, when you're talking about a 14-year-old girl. ...''

Like Sergeant Meeker, there was no one in Milpitas, at least none who could be found and would talk about it, who had any real explanation for either the killing Nov. 3 or what followed.The scant official facts are that Anthony Jacques Broussard, a 16-year-old junior at Milpitas High School, is charged with strangling Marcy Conrad, possibly after raping her, and leaving her body about four miles from town in the hills where some dump leaves and trash.On Tuesday, a hearing is set in Superior Court here to decide whether the young man will be tried as an adult or as a teen-ager. Meanwhile, he is being held without bail as a juvenile on a charge of murder.

But what has shocked this fast-growing community of 38,000 are reports by police investigators, acknowledged by students and school administrators, that the defendant boasted of the crime, then loaded other young people into his white pickup truck and drove them into the hills to view the body. Others, hearing of ''the body in the hills,'' went on their own to look.

According to reports that the police decline to make official because trial is pending and juveniles are involved, some of them made bets on whether or not the body was real, and one girl snipped a patch or decal off a piece of the victim's discarded clothing.Sergeant Meeker confirmed that a number of young people had gone to look at the body in the two days before anyone reported seeing it. '

'There were people up there when we were up there,'' he said, ''kids coming up. While we were at the scene, cars came up with two or three juveniles in them, saw the police cars and turned around and left.''

Why, for two days, until a former student who saw the body finally went to the police, did no one report it?
''Whether it was fear or whatever would be hard to say,'' said Meeker, who added that he had interviewed seven youths who admitted looking at the body. ''But they knew it was a dead body, definitely - the location of the body, what they could see from the road, nobody in their right mind could think it was a mannequin.''

Only one of the students who saw the body has been charged as an accessory. The police say he went to view the body with the defendant and dumped a garbage bag of leaves on it in an apparent attempt to hide it. As for the others, Sergeant Meeker said, ''Failure to report a body is not a crime.''

Nor, he said, would the reported snipping of a patch from the victim's clothes be illegal unless it was done to help conceal the crime.Reaction to the incident here varies. Milpitas itself has the newminted feel of a once-small farming community that burgeoned first into a factory town with the coming of an auto plant and is now belatedly becoming part of the Silicon Valley, startled heir to the boom in the electronics industry.The town has long been the brunt of local jokes; its name, its bucolic origins and what is perceived as kind of a hangdog lack of pretension to community spirit all play a part. And now many are angry at what seems a new community affront.

School authorities, among others, are angry at the bad publicity that has resulted. Richard P. Mesa, the superintendent of Milpitas schools, refused comment and hung up on a caller who inquired about student attitudes.

''I don't want to be a party to any more of the crap that has been written,'' he said. Others blamed television, both its violence and what they saw as its inculcation of a sense of unreality, an inability to distinguish emotionally between a real act of violence and one on a flickering screen.

Others found a general sense of moral insensitivity, among adults as well as teen-agers. Some students at Milpitas High have expressed indignation and concern over the apparent callousness of their classmates and the resultant black eye in the media. But others seemed either little concerned or prone either to sympathize with, or distance themselves from, the six-foot-four, 230-pound suspect. No one mentioned the victim.

John Ellis, head librarian at Milpitas Public Library, was among those who saw television as the culprit.
''I don't think the kids here are different from anywhere else in he country,'' he said. ''They're all touched by the same media; the impact of violence on TV is the same as everywhere else.''
Charles Perotti, the principal at Milpitas High, said he regarded press inquiries as ''irresponsible.'' However, he said he had spoken to four students who had seen the body and maintained that ''there was a tremendous amount of regret for not having moved more quickly'' to inform the police.

''The kids were confused,'' he said. ''Two didn't believe that it was real, the other two weren't sure. They were scared.''

Milpitas High, a 12-year-old school in a quiet residential neighborhood, is a well-integrated campus, according to James Brennan, the assistant principal. About 40 percent of its 1,600 students are members of minorities - Samoans, Filipinos, blacks, Mexican-Americans, Cambodians, Vietnamese.Mr. Brennan acknowledged that there was a small group of students referred to as ''stoners,'' because marijuana smoking was a primary recreation, and some have suggested that Jacques Broussard was a member.The ''stoners'' are not so much an organized group as a collection of what Mr. Brennan called ''burnouts'' -bored, often truant, uncaring.But Sgt. Meeker said drugs appeared to have no connection with the case.

John Simpson, a 17-year-old black student, said he knew Jacques Broussard. ''Yeah, I used to beat him up every day,'' he said. Despite his size, the suspect had a reputation for being unable to take care of himself. ''No one was scared of Broussard,'' Mr. Simpson said. ''Jacques wasn't that much of a likeable person so that people would want to cover for him,'' said a 16-year-old who also knew Marcy Conrad. ''He was scared of everybody.''

Jacques Broussard is black. The victim and most of those who went to see the body were white, and the officials say there were no indications that race was a factor in the incident. Apprehensions about informing on a fellow student might have played a part, Sergeant Meeker said. He also mentioned another case two years ago in San Jose, 10 miles from Milpitas, in which two teen-agers murdered the parents of one of the boys and buried them in a back yard. Afterward, he said, they told a dozen acquaintances, including the son of a local judge, none of whom apparently believed the tale or saw fit to tell police.

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Disgust is what I felt at reading this article. How could someone go and see the body of a murder victim and not report what they had seen? Subsequent articles in the Caifornia newspapers revealed that not only did students not tell, they actually persecuted those who did come forward.

It was on that day that I realized that America had a new generation with which to contend: a generation of people who openly look at sin and see nothing wrong at all.

I'm still shocked whenever I read this.




The New York Times
December 14, 1981, Monday, Late City Final Edition