Evil in Iowa

It was early in the morning. I had just taken my first sip of coffee, just barely awake. I saw the headline and was very close to ignoring it in favor of a story about the Federal Reserve, but I made the mistake of clicking. I have not been able to shake it out of my mind since.

There was a 16 year old high school student in Iowa who had just received a bad grade from his Spanish teacher. He scheduled a meeting with her to discuss her many deficiencies as a teacher. He left the meeting having not secured any accommodation. His poor grade would stand. Then, he recruited a friend, another 16 year old, to follow the teacher after school ended. They knew that she would stop at a nearby park after school to take a walk before driving home. They met her there and proceeded to beat her to a pulp with a baseball bat. Afterwards they dragged her body into the woods and covered it with a tarp and some railroad ties, then drove her van several miles away and abandoned it on a back road. It wasn’t hard for the police to track them down after they discovered her body since they had boasted about it on social media. When the police took the boy into custody and asked him for an explanation he replied, “the grade in my Spanish class was messing up my GPA.”

There were photographs with the story…

Here are the killers. The one on the right is the boy who’s GPA had been ruined by his poor grade in Spanish. The one on the left is his accomplice. But, there was another picture, this one of the victim…

Meet Nohema Graber, 66. It was when I saw this photograph that I was overcome with what I can only describe as deep sadness along with an emotion that I’m not sure I have ever experienced before…hopelessness. 

This is the kind of story that will live rent free in my head for several days. I will ponder it and try to make sense of such a death as this. There’s just something about her face, sturdy and proud. She could have been retired, probably still worked either out of economic necessity or of a love of teaching and devotion to her students. But now she’s dead, beaten beyond recognition and left under a tarp by two boys capable of unimaginable cruelty. I am left to think about the human race and our limitless capacity for evil.

I ask myself, why this case? What makes it special? The answer is—nothing. There is nothing noteworthy about two teenagers committing cold blooded murder anymore. This is America after all. We are especially adept at this sort of thing. At least they didn’t use a gun. If they did all anyone would be talking about is the scourge of gun violence. Good thing the killers weren’t black or illegal immigrants. Then the subject would be racism and our porous border. But since this didn’t involve any of those things, we are left simply to contemplate how such a thing could be possible? On the other hand, because it didn’t involve either of those things maybe we don’t even talk about it at all. I stumbled on this story almost by accident. Have any of you heard about it?

This murder took place almost a year ago. It was in the news because it is finally now going to trial, the two killers will be tried as adults.

In all honesty, I have never been the most empathetic person in the world. Especially when I was younger I was much more tough love than a shoulder to cry on type of guy. My default reaction to hearing someone’s tale of woe would eventually involve an eye-roll or two and the advice to stop belly aching and do better. In other words, I’ve never been a bleeding heart. But more recently I have discovered a surprising well of emotion living inside me that comes out at the oddest times. Here I was, alone downstairs in my house before dawn reading this awful story and coming across this photograph of 66 year old Nohema Graber and suddenly it was everything I could do to keep from crying. Why? Why this story and none of the thousand others even more brutal than this that have come before? I don’t know. I have no answer other than the fact that I am tired, tired of the manifestations of evil in our world. I’m tired of people murdering other people in cold blood with no remorse. I’m tired of the death of innocents. Hell, I’m even tired of the murder of bad people.

The more I think about this case the more it occurs to me that I don’t know the back stories here. Maybe these two boys have horrible, idiot parents. Maybe they come from unfathomable dysfunction. For that matter, maybe this teacher is no bargain either. Maybe she was abusive and dismissive of these boys, maybe she was a terrible teacher with a vendetta against the kids. But whatever those back stories might be, none of it would justify this outcome. Nothing would.

My church is in the midst of a sermon series on angels. A question has arisen about why it seems easier to believe in the existence of evil spirits than it is to believe in angels. After this story I am tempted to believe that the reason people believe more in demons than angels is that we see far more evidence of demonic work than we see of the angelic. No matter where we look, evidence for evil exists, now to the point where even a story like this one hardly makes a ripple in our consciousness. 

But, I am reminded of the words of the Apostle Paul in the Book of Romans where he tells us, “Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

I’m trying, Paul, honestly I’m trying. But some days are better than others.