BBM
I agree. It took 2 days, a private investigator, a high powered lawyer and high level officials right up to the PM himself to get homicide involved. That really says it all to me.
This family is in denial, the way most families are when a family member kills someone or commits suicide. We have heard that "I don't believe it, he would never do something like that" from every family member from Kurt Cobain to Robin Williams to Heath Ledger to Stephan Paddock to Devin Kelley. Families just cannot admit that all their members are not perfect.
The LE on the scene made the call and yes mistakes are sometimes made by LE, but something in that crime scene led them to deem it a murder suicide right out of the gate.
I feel for these kids, they lost their parents in one of the most cruel and needless ways imaginable. But it is a lot of time and money wasted to appease a rich and powerful family when they could be spending it solving a real murder. IMO when the LE come back with a murder suicide they need to send these rich kids the bill for all the man hours and money spent on equipment and resources and make them pay it.
JMO
Ok, I'm going to finally weigh in here. These derogatory stereotypes/getting inside the minds of families whose loved ones die by suicide, or where there is a suicide ruling, are getting old. I can tell you exactly why the Sherman family came out with the statement about the initial leap to a murder-suicide conclusion.
I lost my son in January 2016 and it was ruled a suicide, which it may have been. But the police were lazy and decided it was a suicide before a single detective or CSI was on scene, or a single witness was questioned. This was all ultimately based on a narrative by the 911 caller who was the most likely person to be complicit and had begun hand feeding police a big bowl of word salad that they eagerly swallowed. Dispatch, of all sources, declared "suicide" to a family member out of state after she had been called by the panicked salad tosser who was about to load her pants that my son was dead and police were showing up.
What I can tell you about death 'investigations', at least in my city, where there is any suspicion of suicide and where 'homicide' doesn't jump out and hit the police in the head, the inquiry is shrugged off as a perfunctory walking around the scene, and leaning on the autopsy for opinion on what happened. In my son's case, there was a 'Ya, it's suicide' conclusion at the scene, followed by a working backwards to make select pieces, primarily promoted by the (lying) third party, align with the rushed theory.
Thankfully, families often conduct their own investigations and I did mine
all on my own. I started with the convoluted police and autopsy reports which defied what the third party told police. There is, for example, a 54 minute gap in the timeline which means that for the tale and time frame told to police to be true, my son would have to have shot himself, waited 54 minutes, then shot himself again with the same bullet. According to CSI who wandered belatedly to the scene after yammering with the third party, the gun was here, then it was there, and my son's hands weren't bagged or swabbed, nor were the hands of two people central to that morning's events even checked. The gun was not my son's every day carry. The second person was not even interviewed by police. The ruling came within 6 hours of my son's body being found. The detective had multiple implausible timelines, despite supposedly having a read a phone log that was central to the timeline. She did not look at my son's phone, and she only glanced at the 'recents' on the other party's phone then handed the phone back to her.
When I asked where everyone was and who had control of what phone and when, I was screamed at and told "NOTHING is going to change the outcome of this investigation!"
So, I went on a journey. Into 5 years of my son's electronic footprint, that included all his communications until the last 4 hours and 4 minutes of his precious life. What was said to have happened did not happen. Was it suicide? Maybe. Was it murder? Maybe. And there is a lot of in between that is just plain sinister and an ambush style luring. I would call what I discovered bone-chilling and so mind-bending, I will never recover.
This business of families allegedly being too stoopid, too in denial, too distraught, or even mentally ill themselves, and lacking basic sense - while perfect strangers who free these cases from the facts (by never looking for them in the first place) are viewed as speakers of gospel, is, for me, over. As for costs, our citizens here can be confident that no nickel that might have led to the truth was even spent.
I don't know the Sherman family. I don't know the private dynamics of the marriage of Barry and Honey Sherman. I don't know what happened because I don't have the complete set of facts and evidence from the scene or elsewhere. But I can tell you that the only road to a sober and reasonable conclusion to a "suspicious" death investigation is to actually have a complete investigation that truly eliminates all other possibilities.
This family was absolutely right to say, WHOA, Nellie, we are not there yet."
In memory of Zachary and on behalf of any family member who is lacking due diligence.
