10:22 p.m.

[ What good are we? ]

I just saw an episode of Cold Case Files on A&E that told the story of a little girl who was tortured then murdered back in 1969 in Chicago. She had two brothers who not only didn't know one another, they didn't know she had ever existed until one of them was contacted following the discovery of her remains in a garden. The garden sat between the house the boys had lived in with their parents and the house next door, in a very narrow courtyard (the two boys were later separated). The coroner who examined the bones said that he had never in all of his many years seen such a horrible act of cruelty inflicted on a child. She had been starved and abused and was most likely near death when her mother picked her up and compressed her body. The little girl's ribs were fractured and the pressure applied was so intense that her mother left fingernail imprints on the bones as she killed her. The child's body was then buried in the garden where it lay undiscovered for thirty years. Detectives found her brother, older by two years, through records kept by the Board of Education. After a positive identification was made they tracked down her mother, then on her deathbed herself from heart failure. She confessed to the murder then died five days later.

There is nothing to mark this little girl's path into this world except her birth certificate. Pictures of her were destroyed after her murder. Her mother not only took her life, she took away any proof that she had ever lived. It was as if she never existed.

I had not yet gotten around to adding the memorial page I have been planning to put here but I'm determined to at least get a start on it tonight. That child had a name and at one time she had a life, miserable and short though it was. I need to find the right graphic to post in place of her picture then I'll get started. Daniel Pearl still has a place there too. He always will because I was so moved by his story. I'm also going to put up a memorial for Baby Michael, a newborn who was brutally beaten to death and tossed to the side of the road in North Carolina. I can't post the only surviving picture of him because it's a wanted poster and the trauma to his little body is too much for me to bear seeing. Admittedly I'm being very cowardly about that, but I haven't seen the poster in over a year and it still torments me. I don't need to have my memory refreshed.

I have a beautiful burning candle graphic to post next to the pictures, one that's prettier and more appropriate than the purple torches I had on the site before.

Again, I'm appealing to people who may pass through and want to add someone to the memorial page to send me the url of the picture and the person's name, age and cause/date of death and I'll post it (along with your link), with a burning candle graphic. I only ask that the picture be hosted by the person who owns it because I don't have the space to host a lot of images, and that the images be of the person the way they were when they were alive. No casket pictures or morgue photos. I'll be happy to post them and will open up additional pages if necessary.

I have some serious searching to do to find a pretty baby girl and baby boy graphic and I have to download the images and prepare the captions under them so it will probably take awhile but I think I can at least have the project started by tonight.

I wish I had gotten started on it sooner.

Sometimes the cruelty that people inflict on one another makes me wonder if there's any hope for us as a species.

If we can't or won't take care of the most helpless among us what good are we?