It's curious that Michelle Kasperek lived on St. Florian Street and that she is believed to have been murdered on May 4, the Catholic feast day for St. Florian. St. Florian is the patron saint of, most prominently, firefighters. The Florian cross so often used as an emblem for the firefighting profession is named after him. Looking up the history of St. Florian, he seems to be especially venerated in Austria and Poland, with the veneration centered about the St. Florian Augustinian monastery near Linz, Austria, and about the St. Florian Church in Krakow, Poland.
St. Florian was martyred in 304 A.D. as a result of the anti-Christian policies of Emperor Diocletian. St. Florian is purportedly buried beneath the basilica at the
Augustine monastery at St. Florian, located some 10 miles from Linz. The monastery is from at least 819 A.D. What might make this monastery significant to sketchy people is that Hitler considered Linz his hometown and some of his favorite music in his later years was written by Anton Bruckner, who was formerly the organist at the monastery and who is buried beneath the organ. Hitler had the monks evicted and encouraged Heinrich Glasmeier to turn the monastery into a place centered on Bruckner devotion and on April 4, 1943 (curiously 25 years to the day before MLK was shot) went beneath the organ in a
ritual visit to Bruckner's coffin. Later, on May 1, 1945, German radio would announce Hitler's death (he killed himself April 30, 1945) while playing the adagio from Bruckner's 7th Symphony.
St. Florian is widely considered a patron saint of Poland. Some of his relics were being carted by oxen (or horses?) to Krakow when the oxen (at least according to lore) decided to stop not far what was then the city boundary. This was considered a sign, and so in the late 12th century the Church of St. Florian was built at this very spot to house the relics. When Kasperek was murdered, John Paul II was pope. "
As a young priest, Father Karol Wojtyla served as assistant pastor and university chaplain at St. Florian Church in Kraków". Later this priest became St. John Paul II. (I can't find anything definitive, but I believe from various accounts on internet he was at St. Florian for a few years starting in 1949.) So that's a weird coincidence, too, especially considering Kasperek is a Polish surname (one of the heroes of the navy of Free Poland during WWII was
Kazik Kasperek). I suppose murderers may try to desecrate the memory of those widely held sacred.
What else seems to be weird about May 4 is that the Truesdell Bridge disaster happened May 4, 1873, the day before McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz (whose parents had emigrated from Poland) was born. The bridge disaster was essentially next to the current location of Dixon High, where the 2018 school shooting was thwarted by heroic Officer Mark Dallas. Reagan's alma mater was Dixon High, which was located in a different part of town when Reagan went there, but when Reagan graduated he was living with his family very close to both the current location of the high school and also the site of the bridge disaster. Truesdell created the dangerously weak "Truesdell truss" bridge design for his bridges when he lived in Warren, Massachusetts, but he had a factory in Belvidere, Illinois, where I guess the ironwork in the bridge was manufactured. In my opinion, there's a good chance James Earl Ray chose to escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary when he did because two days earlier (21 April 1967) there had been a tornado that killed a bunch of school kids in Belvidere and also a (non lethal) interurban disaster in South Bend, and he considered these disasters to be an auspicious omen of some sort.
Of course, now May 4 is more widely known as Star Wars Day ("May the Fourth" be with you).
