One in a million?
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The deaths we encounter in our professional lives as physicians usually result from disease or an accident. When we consider our personal lives, we tend to think along similar lines. The chance that a family member will be murdered seems remote: “one in a million.” Yet in 1995, my daughter ⇓ Melissa was murdered during a carjacking. Since then, my wife, Lynn, and I have been living every parent’s worst nightmare. In the instant it took to fire one bullet, an act of unprovoked violence transformed my life from one I thought was perfect into one that will forever be tainted by her death.
My family was preparing to go to St. Louis for Melissa’s graduation from Washington University when we received that terrible middle-of-the-night phone call. We were informed that Melissa and a friend had just left a Cinco de Mayo dinner celebration in a “very safe” neighborhood when they were abducted. Both young women were shot through the head. Melissa died. The other woman miraculously survived and recently graduated from law school. She helped convict the assailants.
Melissa was born when I was a neurology resident at the University of Rochester. She was every parent’s dream child. We used to tease her that she came out of the womb perfect. She had the ability to be all things to all people. She made an enormous impact in her brief 22 years. She would have had an even greater impact in the years she should have lived.
Three days before her death, Melissa wrote, in a final examination, about violent acts against women that “attempt to break the human spirit and destroy the state of mind of those involved . . . In spite of the brutality imposed on them,” she wrote, “women almost always find some …
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