RIP, Karla

     This is 20 year-old Karla Rodriguez of Framingham, Massachusetts. Last Thursday afternoon at 2, Karla was shot about two miles from my house in Hudson, MA and she died early yesterday morning. She was shot by her ex boyfriend, Luis Santos, who is now in custody and will be arraigned on Monday.
     Karla was from Puerto Rico, perhaps brought over here by her family because they thought she'd have a chance at a better life. I got this photo off her Facebook page. She left behind a baby boy who will never get to know his mother because she was forever taken from him by an inhuman little monster who shot her because he got angry during an argument. This was our little town's first murder in over 12 years.

     I know news like this would all too quickly fall into the Memory Hole in large cities like Boston or New York. But here in Hudson, these things just don't happen because we prize life. When we hear a car backfire, we assume it's a car backfiring because it always is. Our banks don't get robbed. Our homes don't get invaded. Our cars don't get jacked. And our mothers and daughters don't get shot to death.
     But the last homicide that took place here was a double murder of a couple in their apartment, again, just down the street from my house, and it was believed to be drug-related. We've had a few opioid overdoses here to remind us that our once safe little burg isn't immune from the evils that are supposed to hit larger, more populous cities. We have an orderly drug trade that almost regularly claims lives. And now we have another senseless murder committed by a young man who illegally had a hand gun. Here in Massachusetts, we have some of the most stringent gun control laws in the country but it still wasn't enough to keep Karla Rodriguez from getting killed in her own car.
     There is something, everything, so terribly wrong with this with a girl barely out of her teens getting taken forever from her baby boy. And sometimes it takes a local tragedy to remind us that no one, no town is immune from the needless senseless violence that's supposed to happen elsewhere yet nowhere. RIP, Karla. You will be missed.