To the Editor:
I am not connected with your community. In fact I live miles and miles away, but I have been affected by what I've been reading concerning the Zantop murders, as I'm sure millions of us are.
It is a tragic, tragic event that has surrounded your community recently and I can't claim to know what the people closely involved with this are feeling.
Mostly, I have been struck with the number of interviewees connected with suspects that proclaim how "uncharacteristic" it would be for these two to have committed this crime. That may be true, but how many times have we heard that? I think that the truth is that we just don't want to believe it. If we accept that two seemingly harmless, typical teenagers are capable of such a monstrous act, then we have to accept that just about anyone we know could commit the same crime.
We have to acknowledge that underneath the surface of the nicest, most personable person we know, there lurks a dark, evil persona that we hopefully will never see. The sadness is that this is really the truth. We never know what is really behind someone's face, what they're really thinking or feeling. I'm sure each of us has thoughts or emotions that we would never dare share or act on. It is a scary but undeniable reality.
