Why Meredith Might Have Survived If The Attackers Had Cared And Called For Help Very Fast

Comments

It is wise to always keep in the front of our minds just what torture Meredith went through at the hands of these two murdering cowards.

Sollicito and Knox just ran away. As to Guede he did also except as yet, we do not really know when that was. (panic running on the stairs etc:)

In my view it is dangerous to start analyzing   the analysis because that loses the remembrance of how these two killed her in the most cowardly disgusting way possible. ie a slow death while Meredith understood full well what was happening to her.

And yes I am angry, I have been from the very beginning. My main hope is that true justice will prevail and these two will go to prison for a very long time. However let me point out that even if for some reason Knox does not she will not be able to hide from us for the rest of her natural life. This goes on. What is it now five years? Doesn’t matter how long it takes.

What do you think of this one ?
http://spiritmanor.blogspot.de/2012/02/meredith-kerchers-ghost.html
Maybe a little inappropriate , please fell free to remove if anyone finds this offensive but I do feel interested .

Hi, aethelred23, Lovely story. Many have had similar spiritual experiences, but shared quietly because some react to the subject or don’t believe in spirits. It explains why you follow the case, nothing wrong with that.

Slight correction. Malala Yousufzai is the brave Pakistani, not Afghan schoolgirl who spoke up for her right to an education.

What happened to that beautiful country after the events shown in “Charlie Wilson’s War” is a tragedy in itself.

Hi Cardiol

Very sad. Some people can be so cruel and one thing I believe now that I didnt believe five years ago is the number of cruel people is going up.

Such medical detail matters so much but also it haunts some jury members for years.

In the case of each presentation in 2009 that Cardiol describes, several of the lay judges and some others in court were in tears.

Hi Ergon

What happened? Colonialism? I trace a lot back ultimately to messy and reluctant handover at the end. Also poor growth knowhow which is still not getting any better.

I was posted in two countries (northern Nigeria and Sudan) which were becoming more radically islamic while I was there. In both cases a huge factor (absent real growth) was oil money from Saudi Arabia - and the Saudis were okay guys till the British ratted on them after WWI.

Which is the beautiful country? I guess I need to see the film.

With the greatest respect I would hardly call this brave little girls attempted murder by crazed religious zealots a hazing.Isn’t this the little girl who was shot in the head?

Hi D2FK, yes I see it really was an attempt on her life. I changed it. I think she lives for now in the UK and she’s just been in New York where the UN gave her a Human Rights award.

She’s still only 16 and as National Public Radion website says “...has become one of the most influential voices for human rights in the world: She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; she has published an autobiography, and been feted by celebrities far and wide, including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth”.

Meanwhile, back home, the engineered rage there would make the FOA feel right at home.

Hi, DF2K, I’m not sure where either attack, on Meredith or Malala Yousufzai, is described as a “hazing”. Both were horrible crimes.

@Peter, the beautiful country is to the North Of Pakistan, now under siege by religious fanatics. Yes, indeed, corrupted by Saudi money.

My cousin, who used to run expeditions to K2 base camp, knows Jon Krakauer, has the most beautiful photos of that part of the world, truly idyllic.

Hi Ergon,

Yes, I see Malala comes from a town a few miles north (and in the next valley west) from where Bin Laden was found. The attack helicopters who got to him might have flown right over her head.

I think everybody who ever sees them finds the foothills of the Himalayas a haunting place. So many fine movies made there back in the day (not the excellent Black Narcissus though as you probably know.)

We have an impressive level of readership in India and Pakistan, which is very nice.

Hi, Cardiol!

Excellent excellent article however stark.

We need to keep these stark facts out in the open.

We need to continue to let the world know exactly what happened. 

Exactly what Knox and Sollecito (and Guede) DID to Meredith.

Hi Ergon,

Just FYI,  The caption below the header photo of Malala initially said she was the victim of a hazing. It has now been edited and says “victim of a Taliban assassination attempt”.

Thank you Cardiol

The horrific nature of the attack on Meredith can’t be emphasised too often. There must be no mercy shown to AK and RS if and when they are finally convicted.

I was reading details of the Manson murders the other day, as you do.(I have a bookshop so I get to read a lot that I wouldn’t normally buy!). There were frantic multiple stabbings in that case too and apparently the killers went back to the ranch in ecstatic mood.

I wonder what mood AK & RS were in when they left. I doubt they were overcome by the enormity of their crime as has been suggested - maybe they were also in some mad delirium, possibly even when they were later doing the staging for the “perfect” cover-up. Certainly they were weirdly upbeat the next morning - and still when buying underwear some time later.

Thanks, DF2K. I missed that, I’m afraid. But Malala’s story obviously affects us all too, the dangers of religious fanaticism in this world.

Most Pakistanis are Sufi Muslims which emphasizes religious tolerance, but that was then, when it used to be a beautiful country.

@aethelred23

If you’re interested I highly recommend “When the Impossible Happens”,by Stan Grof, for tales of extraordinary synchronicities, spiritual experiences, etc.

The materialistic worldview is quite definitely not the whole story.

http://goo.gl/iG4eaz

Apologies if you’ve already come across it.

Thank you cardiol, for bringing attention to the Malala story and the small corrections.

It is a story in which an individual showed extraordinary courage, without knowing what it is. She simply followed her heart and head. I do think that many grown up people are unable to do that.

It is extraordinary because others failed to stand up. The courage came from conviction, not from physical strength. Physical strength has no meaning in front of a bullet. That she survived the bullet is a miracle, but that is beside the point.

Taliban made her a hero. She was otherwise just a very unremarkable girl student in a small town. And the Taliban ideology took a beating. A slumbering nation woke up. That is something the taliban never bargained for.

They have vowed to kill her again. Whether they will succeed or not is not important. The important thing is that the world is watching.

Most of the medical treatment were carried out in UK. But millions of us prayed for her.

Hi Chami

That is a terrific comment. This will play out over many years and the groundswell already seems to be with her. I hope this has an effect where it really matters: in the systems society has created to advance and control itself - in this case the systems for education, policing, justice, and of course growth.

I have immense regard for that kind of leadership. Time and again in development we see someone strike out in a new direction and it catches fire and sooner or later 80-90 per cent of everybody is after them.

Why this paradigm change matters so much is that systems have a terrible habit of locking up, stagnating, freezing everything in place. This is happening all over the world, and slowing growth, but it is worst in the older societies where their systems go back a long way.

It takes a real jolt to escape enough people out from under their iron grip and to suggest: let’s try something different. I’ve not doubted that Meredith wanted to be in development and had the leadership potential for that same kind of effect. Women are often better at this than men are.

By the way, at 16 Malala is the same age as Katniss in the Hunger Games series

Episode 2 is now showing in theaters worldwide and the series is having an appreciable effect on girls of that same age in the US and maybe beyond here. Of all fantasy series in recent years, Hunger Games seems to me maybe the most relevant

I just hope at the end of Episode 3 it results in good government (our stance here) and not just no government which is never a good idea.

I knew it! That there would be an associating of Katniss and Malala out there somewhere.

In fact Google has 865,000 hits for the two together. This one is on a blog in a Pakistani newspaper, no less:

http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/tag/malala-yousafzai/

@Cardiol
Thanks for putting things in perspective (again), people have to remember that justice must be served for the original crime in the original context (grueling, I know), not for the murder-lite projection of the crime and/or of the assumed evolution of the perpetrators’ character after many years will have passed. If such evolution is real, the perpetrators will be the first ones to take responsibility and try to atone for their sins (not the case here).

After so many years, these two idiots (AK & RS) are still trying to get away with it, and sadly, in light of what I know now (or think I know) about their character, I cannot see how, with the adrenaline going through the roof at the moment of the murder, they could have rendered basic help to a beautiful human being they had wounded so terribly.

Incidentally, I watched last night the interview (on YouTube) with novelist Anne Perry (aka convicted murderer Juliet Hulme), which you recommended in one of your comments on pseudoinnocence (original post by Vivianna) a couple of years ago, very powerful stuff, indeed. I don’t think I could truly forgive Ms. Perry for what she did, but I did shed a tear for her and for the things we humans cannot reverse, and I did ask myself who was I to forgive. Ms. Perry did a terrible thing, but she could look people in the eye now and say it with dignified and tragic remorse - it brings closure on Earth; after that, one is one’s toughest judge.

Just horrifying to relive what happened and to hear the details from a doctor.  Thank you for bringing that to the forefront.  It highlights even more strongly the bizarre, callous and disrespectful behavior of RS and AK in the police station cavorting, laughing, kissing as was reported by the other girls sitting with them.  It defies the imagination.  Even if one can think that the murder was done under the influence of drugs, the facts show that it was not a wild frenzy but rather a calculated series of blows and a complete and horrifying disregard for human suffering and life.  I can only hope that MK’s family is not reading this article but I think they know some of it already.  To imagine one’s beloved child dying like that, alone, fearful, in pain, is too much to bear.  Can even Italian RS escape justice in his new Carribbean idyll?  If he was only there after the fact to help in a clean-up or a very minor player, wouldn’t he have already confessed, and turned the tables on AK,  and would he be hiding there?  Surely his great admiration and affection for AK of two weeks acquaintance would not have held enough strength to carry on for 5-6 years and more unless he were more directly involved.

Likewise RG’s behavior in not calling for an ambulance, fleeing a dying girl in panic, establishing an alibi by dancing at a nightclub, is equally terrible and he deserves even more time in jail.  He might have been a fool and coerced into something, but we don’t know that really, and he was definitely there, involved and left her to die.  Someone locked the door.  We don’t know if it was immediately afterwards or later after the clean-up do we?  It could have been only AK and RS who locked the door and threw away the phones, later in the night.

I meant Meredith’s bedroom door.  It’s unclear when exactly it was locked.  I suspect later in the night during the clean-up rather than immediately.  I think they all three ran, and possibly RG a little later than the other two, as he basically said in his story, fearing he would get all the blame, which he did.

Odysseus has an excellent point. It has been repeatedly suggested that they enjoyed what they had done and were on some sort of a high for several or some days. In fact, for years.

Recordings of them in the police station suggest they thought they were running rings around the cops and enjoying sending them in wrong directions.

I do believe that buying the underwear gave them a kick and they didnt give a damn about Meredith’s memorial which they alone among all Meredith’s acquaintances chose to skip.

We know that Meredith died clutching her kneck on both sides to try to stop the blood running out.

A medical question therefore for Cardiol MD on this:

“...her superior thyroid artery wound was potentially survivable if simple manual compression was quickly applied there-and-then by anyone present, and urgent professional assistance was then obtained.”

Might we know where the pressure could have been applied? Where is that artery?

Yes, behaved like cowards.What exactly were Knox and Sollecito doing after Meredith had been fatally wounded but was still in her throes?

@Ergon

By the way, Ergon, there´s another thing I would like to ask you , if I might.
It concerns your article “The Criminal Mind” ,your analysis of how criminality takes root inside the brain .There i a certain passage in there that has always struck me :
What is the relationship between criminality and biology? Nineteenth-century phrenologists insisted that criminality was innate, a trait inherent in the offender’s brain matter. While they were eventually repudiated as pseudo-scientists and self-deluded charlatans, today the pendulum has swung back.

Does this constitute a reference to may I use the word :Eugenics?

Hate takes hold early in life. When we are children we believe what we are told. We copy our surroundings and in essence become our parents or for example, a woman who is in an abusive relationship will tend to be attracted to abusive partners no matter how many partners she has. A woman with an alcoholic father will generally end up with an alcoholic husband. This works in two directions of course both male and female. People develop who they are because of the lessons they learn in childhood which is familiar and therefore comfortable no matter how destructive that may be.

The inference of bottled hate or dislike, or frustration, or the implication of being laughed at because the person feels inferior, if untreated will eventually explode with terrible results This is rampant everywhere. I see another School shooting in the US and this on the anniversary of
Sandy Hook elementary school. Another student with a shotgun intent upon revenge against a teacher who he thought made fun of him or something along those lines.

This of course is Amanda Knox all over. The lessons she learned from her mother who she described as a free spirit, and the obvious mental abuse and abandonment by her father plus her real dislike of her step father is indicative of repressed hate particularly when faced with superior woman such as Meredith whom Knox could never hope to emulate. This is the recipe for hate and revenge.

Not all people necessarily end up like their parents, therefore defying genetic and social predetermination. Take Liz Murray, for instance, a woman whose parents were both mentally defective alcoholics and drug -abusers but who decided to lead a better life and practically ascended from “Homeless to Harvard.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJu_C3Eh-ds

No idea if all school shooters have the same motivations and I can´t say what drove Adam Lanza to the insane act of murdering innocent defenceless children at Sandy Hook.As in my previous post on the Columbine boys I suppose all school shootings were characteristically carried out by psychopaths who had been ostracized by their communities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHo8vK9CY8E&list=PLnRyK4XAr9SgL_4_GmDtyztZbSZVF8aMp

I think it´s all down to our own decisions who we decide to become.“There is no gene for the human soul”.

Of course not. That’s a generalization on my part. There are many exceptions of course but lessons learned in childhood are lessons we carry all our lives. Instinctively we feel comfortable with the familiar and gravitate towards that territory. Some children who come from perfectly good homes turn into complete animals of course. I’m not suggesting that every case in the same either but any study of Jung or Freud or in particular Alfred Adler will bare this out.

As to Adam Lanza since he killed his mother first perhaps that is a clue. Mental sickness can be exacerbated by conditions.

Interesting, lovely question, aethelred23. Will answer after I meet my (self-imposed) deadline :(

But no, Eugenics is what they were leading to, in their limited understanding of the so called ‘criminal underclass’ and trying to get past ancient views of ‘evil’. I have an idiosyncratic view of DNA, and we can also guess, nature vs nurture.

Some people turn out that way, and until we learn the spiritual underpinnings of society, we will be arguing, forevermore, on physical causes.

@ Pete: in response to your Post of 12/13/13 at 06:27 PM:

I am saying that it is beyond any reasonable-doubt that the Motive of Meredith’s attackers was to terrify her.

I know you already know that. I write it here only as an ingredient logically-necessary to my reasoning.

The terrifying fact was that holding sharp knives to a person’s throat can be followed by a throat-cutting.

It is also beyond any reasonable-doubt that everyone in Meredith’s room knew that throat-cutting is bloody, interferes with breathing, and is lethal.

They did cut Meredith’s throat.

When an artery is cut there is jet of bright-red blood, pulsating in synchrony with the heart-beat.
Breathing is also pulsatile but at a distinctly slower frequency.
When blood is inhaled there is a pulsatile gurgling-noise in synchrony with the frequency of the breathing.

Those are what Meredith’s killers saw and heard, but they abandoned her, failing to provide any emergency assistance whatsoever.

You ask: “Where is that artery?”

That artery was where they saw the root of the blood-jet.
They needed no more ‘Anatomy’.

You also ask: “Might we know where the pressure could have been applied?”

They could have pressed towards the spine with fingers +/- cloth at the source of visible bleeding, hard enough to stop the visible bleeding.

Then they could also have called for Paramedics.

It would also have helped to keep Meredith’s head lower than her chest to avoid blood being drawn into the lungs.

I disagree that the Taliban made Malala a hero.  Their heinous act did position her as a public figure, but she would have been a remarkable person even if she weren’t attacked or if her attack weren’t widely reported.  What made her (and others like her) a hero was the fact that she had the courage to stand up to an archaic, limited, and savage worldview and to refuse the sub-human status which was relegated to her by the aforementioned worldview.

Similarly, it was not the murderous trio who made Meredith so admired and beloved.  I don’t think those who knew her, and especially those who weren’t part of her family, said she was an amazing person simply out of pity and respect for the dead.  She seems to have touched a lot of people’s lives in a positive manner and to have been well liked and appreciated.

The beasts who tried to destroy them don’t deserve credit for what these women already were.

By the way, Lanza was in love with the Columbine boys, if that explains anything.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25097127

Good morning, aethelred23 (I was up till 3:00AM finishing something :(

Yes indeed, the child of alcoholic or abusive parents can indeed turn out just fine, it becomes a matter of will, or spirit and soul, or free choice. It also depends on parenting then, but one thing that informed my views on psychology was seeing how my parents issues transferred to me and my siblings, I made a lifelong study of how one overcomes that, and how, some, can’t break free of that conditioned straitjacket. Maybe, being the first child helped me, I know Adlerian theory on birth order was influenced by the Tibetan philosophy on that, and Jung’s archetypes are based on astrology, and he just didn’t take it far enough, once he got into his psychotic period.

Adam Lanza was clearly on the autism spectrum disorder, but he was influenced to a great deal by an unstable mother. And, not just him, how many people like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were under the influence of psychotropic drugs? See http://shiftfrequency.com/tag/eric-harris-and-dylan-klebold/

Not to excuse Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito, but, to what extent were their actions that night under the influence of drugs? We will never know, since they were not done immediately or within the proper guidelines for the hair analysis tests done.

Speaking of Astrology, I met someone once who might indeed have been my doppelganger. At a party, one person says “I was born on Gurdjieff’s birthday” and I smile and say, “me too” (there is some dispute whether the reported day is correct) and we compare notes, and it was interesting to see the similarities, of two people born the same time, one in Pakistan and the other in the UK, and one went into the military and the other turned to petty crime/drug dealing, (I won’t say which of us 😉 but both came out of that and turned to a life of mysticism; I think it was inherent in both of us, but nature/nurture and free will/karma/determinism all played a role.

And all this can indeed, play a role in how criminality takes root in the brain. Also, I look at the general, overall increase of psychosis in society, and its causes, and the increase of neurological damage.

We all have free choice, though some might have less.

Hi Ergon

Absolutely correct. My interpretation of this phenomenon is directed, not so much at the family influence alone, but taking into account the society from which one comes. I managed to escape from a grotty little town in the North of England, and since then have been made aware of people still living there who bemoan the fact that they have never left, even though they wanted to.

That’s because although they loathed the place they were too cowardly to leave preferring the familiar to taking a chance on the outside world. Others who did leave that smothering dead environment took it with them by surrounding themselves with people from the same place. This I believe has to be taken into account.

For example, Knox came from an environment that to say the very least was unhealthy. She describes her mother as a ‘free spirit.’ which I hesitate to interpret. Sollicito came from privilege believing he could get anything he wanted since after his mother died he was spoiled rotten and never took responsibility for anything.

Envision the latest fiasco in the USA, that of calling a murder defense. ‘Afluenza’ which translates into rotten parenting. The sixteen year old, in this case, got off without jail time just probation even though he had killed four people driving while drunk.

My point is that Knox and Sollicito took not only their families influence but the influences of the environment they grew up in.

No idea , Harris and Klebold were nobodies before they committed the Columbine high school massacre, yet their photos would appear on the front page of Time magazine with the victims´ pictures reduced to small image. Adam Lanza was a nobody before he committed Sandy Hook yet here we are still talking about him.

If I may add another thought to my previous one and I hope I do not offend: Whilst I agree the Knox PR campaign was doubtlessly one of the most despicable media strategies ever created , helping free a murderer and allowing her to become a celebrity whereas Meredith was eclipsed I will also allow myself to add that thong used to be reversed before her death . Meredith was clearly the popular one, I mean , with a bunch of friend whilst Knox was an outcast in Perugia. Could this have been another sort of injustice ? Do we really need a world where people become superfluous ?

Amanda Knox may have had a fear that people disliked her and/or rejected her, but this would be her own perception, and not necessarily a true reflection of others’ feelings.
The indications are - in spite of her social gaucheness, and a manner which could have been irritating to reserved British - that people were in fact very tolerant towards her ‘eccentricities’ (her word), and did their best to accommodate her, even though it was fairly obvious she did not naturally integrate. People made allowances, as they do. Patrick was not unkind, on the contrary.
Meredith obviously tried to be friendly, and certainly cared, but had a complete right to chose her own friends and activities. She was right to stand up to unacceptable habits - of hygiene for instance.
Being unable to handle social situations is a flaw either in the character or development, which it is an enormous shame a responsible adult didn’t address - long before she was ‘let off the leash’ (untrained) in Perugia.

Prior to the Sandy Hook school shooting, Adam Lanza was not “a nobody”. Rather, he was an emotionally disturbed individual, whose mother’s judgement was clouded by her love for him. She was the irrational adult who provided him access to her own legally obtained firearms, though previously demanding that babysitters not let him out of their sight for an instant, because of his well recognised volatility. And she needed the babysitters so she could escape him for a few hours and occupy her monogrammed barstool at her local.

Hi, aethelred23, looking at Amanda Knox, I don’t see where her ‘celebrity’ status turned out so well for her. Yes, she made a lot of blood money, but, she clearly is haunted by Meredith. She must have felt really inferior to her, and that Meredith was distancing herself from Amanda, clearly was the last straw.

@Ergon
Yes, quite. It really is ‘pathetic’ in the original sense - full of pathos.

Where next:

Or to next entry Why Is Appeal Prosecutor Crini So Very, Very Interested In The Precise Position Of Filomena’s Door?

Or to previous entry With Sollecito’s First Plea For Mitigation Seen As A Flop, His Behavior Seems Extremely Suspect