A serial killer has struck repeatedly in our midst, yet no one seems to care

REMEMBER the Washington Sniper? Just over a decade ago, the US capital and its suburbs were paralysed by fear of a mystery gunman who shot and killed ten strangers over a three-week period.

The first was a 55-year- old computer programmer, picked off by a single bullet as he loaded his shopping in the car park of a grocery store. The following morning, four more victims, all selected by chance, died – a gardener mowing a lawn, a taxi driver filling his car with gas, a babysitter reading a book on a park bench and a young woman vacuuming her caravan.

Over the course of the killers’ spree, a 13-year- old boy was shot as he arrived at school but miraculously survived.

Other victims were gunned down as they shopped or walked on streets or emerged from restaurants.

Quickly, police realised there was a pattern to the killings:

Along with spent shell casings at the gunman’s various vantage points, they found the tarot Death Card and they received messages warning the citizens of Washington that neither they nor their children were safe ‘anywhere, at any time’.

The city and its suburbs rapidly went into terror- stricken lockdown: parents drove their cars right to the doors of the schools and ran with their children to and from safety.

Petrol stations erected awnings to protect customers from view; school trips and outdoor athletic events were cancelled; some schools closed altogether.

THE Washington metropolitan region has a population of 5.7million, making it one of t he most densely inhabited areas of the US. Frightening as the shootings were, the individual risk of falling victim to the sniper was tiny – yet the citizens and authorities in the state were sufficiently alarmed to make significant changes to their routines and their behaviour. The public was advised how best to stay safe while the threat existed and the people themselves remained on high alert during the danger period, notifying the authorities of anything out of the ordinary, taking steps to minimise any risk and watching out for one another’s safety.

Over the past few weeks in this country, at least 11 people, of all ages and backgrounds, all of them going about a simple leisure activity, have died. They ranged from a little boy of ten, Kyle Roche, playing on seaside rocks in Cork with his younger brother, to 77-year- old John Looby, who was enjoying the sunshine in the sea in Clare. They i ncluded 15- year- old Stephen Mitchell, who chased a ball into the river in Limavady, Abayomi Adefabi, aged 16, who was swimming with friends near his Celbridge home, and Joe Killeen, aged 17, who was also swimming with a group of pals, in a canal near Ardnacrusha. At the weekend, a fit and healthy 65- year- old, Joe Grinsell, drowned in a quarry in Tipperary, while two more drowning victims, a man and a woman, were found in seas off Donegal and Cork yesterday.

The previous week, after 19year-old Dubliner Daniel Harding lost his life in a lake in Roscommon, his mother, Ann, said: ‘I heard about two drownings on the news on Thursday and I felt for the families. And here I am, a few hours later, and our Daniel is one of the statistics.’

‘One of the statistics.’ What a deeply desolate yet utterly candid assessment of the country’s reaction to your child’s death.

A shrug of the shoulders, basically, a sigh of regret, an official entry on ledger of lives lost in the 2013 heatwave, and her Dan- iel becomes a small part of a big number. With more heat promised next month, that number is almost certain to grow and each name on the list will become an even smaller part of the total, each one just another statistic.

But at what point, if any, will these statistics become unacceptable?

At what point will we exceed the level of utterly avoidable tragedy we are prepared to live with and ignore? Just over a decade ago, the people of Washington didn’t accept those ten deaths – a tolerable level of attrition in a population so great – as mere statistics. The communal response to the Washington sniper, who was quickly captured and later executed, suggests that changes can be made when a society refuses to accept the inevitability of those ‘statistics’. When people acquaint themselves with risk and when they take steps to keep themselves and their loved ones safe from it, their chances of dodging that grim roll call are considerably better.

There is absolutely no reason why anyone else needs to drown in this country during the first decent summer we’ve had in years. There is no reason why innocent, blameless exuberance should end in tragedy, no reason for another family to have a beloved child counted among those statistics. The loss of fishermen, like the Bolger brothers some weeks back, will always be a wretched consequence of that harsh, demanding livelihood. But drownings on sunny days in leisure areas are not something we have to accept.

NO child in this island nation should leave s chool unable to swim. Nobody, in a country of lakes and rivers, should be unaware of the hazards of swimming in fresh water on even the hottest day. Sea water has more warmth and buoyancy than freshwater, and the most experienced swimmers can suffer cramp and numbness and fatal weakness due to the unexpected cold of a lake or stream. Basic water safety rules and guidelines should be taught from junior infants upwards and the message hammered home regularly – don’t swim after food or alcohol, don’t swim alone and keep an eye out for your friends in the water because drowning people rarely scream and wave.

There should be no such thing as an acceptable level of avoidable death. But if we allow this spate of tragedy to pass without any response, if these drowned souls fail to prompt a response, then we are tacitly acknowledging that there is, indeed, such a level.

And we are admitting that we haven’t quite surpassed it yet.