Can You Look Around At The Families and Not Think of Jan?

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Can You Look Around At The Families and Not Think of Jan?

Hi all.....
My daughter came home early this morning for some Mom and Daughter time. We are very close and it refuels our souls to have days like today.
I like my daughter as a person. Of course I love her. But I genuinely like her. We have always been able to spend time together talking, laughing and discussing so many things. Don't get me wrong, we have battled too. Our personalities are very similar. But under even those tense moments there has always been love and respect.
We spent the day in Lewes and Rehoboth Beach. Swimming in the Delaware Bay, walking on the sand, shopping on The Avenue in Rehoboth, later shopping for shrimp, and the rest of her birthday dinner fixins was a wonderful way to create more memories. Her birthday is on Friday but she will be back home in Laurel then. So we celebrated with her today. Her wonderful husband had to work or he would have joined us. He has a wonderful day planned for her on Friday :)
As we talked and laughed on the sand, I did what I always do. People watch. I'm naturally inquistive and I love to watch people just being themselves.
Today though, it felt a little different to me.
As I watched families laugh and play together all I could think of was Jan Roseboro and her children. Last July she was laughing and playing with her kids....she was enjoying the wonderful home and pool that they had completed. She had previously enjoyed the trip to Niagara Falls with her family. And the trip to the Outer Banks was soon approaching. This was a good time in her life.
And all the while, her husband was planning a wedding with Angela Funk.
She was so betrayed and mistreated by the lies and the cunning, sneaky trysts between Mike and Angie. That is one of the saddest things in this world.
Jan was being Jan. She did seem a bit "off" to some of her friends in the weeks before she was killed. Why, no one really knows. Unless she saw something new and different about Mike and she wondered if this new fling was "it". She had gone through rough patches with Mike before but this time may have seemed more serious.
Even so, Jan just wanted her family. That was all she ever wanted.
And as I watched all those families on the beach today, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry for all that Jan wanted and for all that she never had. For all she and her children lost.
I want to cry for the way Jan died. It may seem morbid, but many of us have tried to imagine the actual details of the last moments of her life. It is surreal to imagine Jan looking into the face of her killer as he attacked her with the intent to end her life.
She had to be so scared, so confused and so terrified that things had taken this turn.
She had to be reeling that a man that she had spent so many years with, a man who she had children with and built a life with, could beat her, strangle her and want to kill her.
That is almost unimaginable. For what she suffered in her last moments of awareness, many of us cry.
I know that many of us have found ourselves in a situation where we thought our moment had come. Mine came as a car that was approaching me on a wide curve lost control and over-corrected. The car slid sideways and headed straight for my car. I veered to the right to try to avoid the impact and in the blink of an eye thought to myself that this was how I was going to die. I have never had such a horrible, dark feeling in my entire life. And in that blink of an eye, I thought of my children. I don't know how much time actually ticked on the clock from the moment I saw that car approach that curve and go into the sideways slide, but it was enough time for me to realize that there was a very good chance I would never make it home. And time enough to think about my children and how sad I was that I wasn't going to see them again.
Those thoughts and feelings were a reaction to a stranger, in a car, about an impending accident, a bad decision to speed into a curve. There was no intent for that driver to crush the life out of me and leave my children motherless.
So very different from what Jan experienced. There was intent to kill her, to take her away from her children. And to inflict horrible pain upon her. And until she lost consciousness, she knew it.
For that I want to cry.
The betrayal and lies were painful enough.
Wasn't that enough Mike? Angie?
You hadn't hurt her enough by what you two did?
You had to beat her and choke the life out of her?
And when you tossed her into the pool, did you care that maybe she still had a pulse and was still breathing? Or was that the perfect ending to your plan?
Did you want the cause of death to be drowning or did you just toss her into the pool like a ragdoll and then walk away?
You beat her senseless and choked her into unconsciousness, right? Or did you push her into the pool as she struggled and then held her under the water until she stopped fighting back?
A blow in anger and rage is one thing. This killing wasn't quick. It took a few minutes. It took a push into the pool or it took holding Jan under the water. This wasn't an accidental killing.
From the time the first blow was struck you had the power to STOP. You would have faced maybe assault and domestic battery charges.
That wasn't the plan. Jan needed to be gone. Completely.
Because you and Angie wanted to be together.
To the two of you, that makes sense.
To the rest of the normal world, it's criminal and immoral.
I know that there are so many of us who are remembering Jan Roseboro every day. We see her wherever there are families with laughing children. And I doubt we will ever forget.
I pray the jury thinks of Jan. Review the evidence and think of Jan.
She never deserved what Mike and Angie did to her. Neither did her children.
God Bless Suzie for loving those children. She is an angel in their lives.