The Metro-North Disaster: Why Did the New Yorker Magazine Publish a Pretentious, Shameless, Pseudo-Intellectual (but Stylish) Rationalization for Ellen Brody’s Mass Killing?

 

[Previously, at WEJB/NSU:

“Metro-North Crash was a Mass Murder-Suicide, Not an Accident; ‘A Split-Second Decision’; ABC News’ Diana Williams Lied About Attack; Did She Suspect Killer Ellen Brody was a Terrorist? (Photos)”; and

“At Funeral Service, Tears and Laughter Celebrate the Life of Metro-North Mass Murderer Ellen Brody.”]
 

 

Murder victim Robert Dirks (Family photo) 

Murder victim Walter Liedtke 

Murder victim Joseph Nadol (Photo: J.P. Morgan) 

Murder victim Aditya Tomar 

Murder victim Eric Vandercar 

By Nicholas Stix

I’m a profiler. Some of the groups I profile are criminals, including their subgroup of government officials, as well as alleged law enforcement officers, alleged educators and alleged journalists.

When a member of a group I’m used to observing acts in a certain way, I cannot necessarily conclude that reality is “X,” but I can conclude that the member believes, “X.”

Given that this is not the sort of story my paying editors are interested in, I haven’t had time to report on, but I’m pretty fed up with the garbage that the MSM has been churning out, to avoid reporting this story, and at the present rate, they may just drive me to journalism.

A number of Daily Mail commenters were dead-enders obsessed with shutting up anyone doubting the media’s official story that Brody was “lost” or “confused,” and that the incident was an “accident.” They kept accusing people of “assuming” things, shouting them down, and ordering them to remain silent until after the official report was issued, even though they were the worst assumers, and were denying what was already known about the mass killing, e.g., via a witness whom no one had reason to doubt, and via NTSB investigators who had already determined that safety precautions at the crossing had all been properly functioning. However, a few commenters contended that Brody’s obliviousness to the mortal danger posed by the oncoming train suggested that she was either high, drunk, or on some psychoactive drug, like, say, Xanax. They argued, correctly, I believe that if she was impaired, she did not belong behind the wheel, in which case she was guilty of vehicular manslaughter and assault; alternatively, if she intended to commit suicide, she was guilty of mass murder and maiming.

Comes now big-name New York Times journalist Sam Tanenhaus, to tell us that accidents are mysterious, unknowable things.

That’s odd. Why, then, do we have agencies like the National Transportation Safety Board? I doubt that the automobile collision that took the life of CBS News reporter Bob Simon will be declared an unknowable “mystery.” And when journalist David Halberstam died in a car accident caused by the recklessness of the man driving him, the former was sentenced to prison, not to musing on life’s vagaries.

Besides, aren’t you supposed to first investigate an incident thoroughly, before declaring it a mystery? And if driving in Westchester were really so treacherous, why don’t such disasters happen all the time? Tanenhaus also repeats the company line of Brody’s family and friends, i.e., that she was “a careful driver.” If there’s one thing we know about Ellen Brody, it’s that she wasn’t a careful driver.

But for argument’s sake, let’s say that Brody was a careful driver. That would undermine the contention that she died in an innocent accident.
 

The Failed Dream of the Easy Commute
By Sam Tanenhaus
February 8, 2015
The New Yorker

Even as rescue teams were sifting through the wreckage of the horrific Metro-North crash last Tuesday—the crumpled Mercedes S.U.V., the molten train coaches—many wondered about the state of mind of Ellen Brody, the motorist who found herself trapped between the crossing arm and the train tracks in Valhalla, New York, in Westchester. Brody was a much respected and highly responsible person (spouse, mom, jewelry-store employee)—and a careful driver, too. In the minutes before the accident, she seemed calm and deliberate. She climbed out of her vehicle to try to dislodge the guard rail and then settled back in, long enough—Rick Hope, the motorist behind her, speculated—to refasten her seat belt. And yet Brody, with time and room to back up, instead drove across the tracks, directly into the path of a train hurtling through at its normal speed, sixty miles per hour [actually, 58 mph]. “The thing’s dinging, red lights are flashing, it’s going off,” Hope told the Times. “I just remember going, ‘Hurry up.’ I just knew she was going to back up—never in my wildest dreams did I think she’d go forward.”

Did Brody, in her panic, mistakenly put the car into drive instead of reverse, or calculate that she could make it through the intersection? No one could say. “Very little is actually known about what causes accidents,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in “Epidemic on the Highways,” his pioneering essay on highway safety, published in 1959. “But all that is known points to the conclusion that accidents result when drivers find themselves in situations to which they cannot respond correctly, either because their minds don’t work fast enough or simply because it’s ‘too late.’ ”

In Westchester, where I’ve lived since 1990, Brody’s fatal error elicited sympathy, including from confident drivers. Even the most practiced of us know how fraught just a routine excursion can be….
 

Read the whole thing here.
 


Mass killer Ellen Brody