(no subject)
A girl went missing last weekend here in Iceland. She was walking home after being out at the bar with her friends. It was five am. The only clue was that a few shops had CCTV cameras that showed her walking past, and there was a red car that passed her just before she stopped showing up on the cameras. It was not much to go on, but piece by piece over the past week it was put together. The car was traced to a ship, the ship was boarded and returned to Iceland. People were arrested, but would not talk. Today her body washed ashore on a beach just south of Reykjavik, and was spotted by one of the helicopters that were out searching.
I have lived in places where violence and murder were far more common than they are here. But I have never felt as personally affected. She disappeared off a street a few hundred feet from my house, where I walk every single day. On the advice of the police, I checked my basement in case she had just been drunk and tired and trying to find shelter from the bad weather and got to my back door, and as unlikely as it was, my heart broke a little bit to find it empty. This is, both literally and figuratively, very close to home. Last night I got out of a taxi basically at the spot where she disappeared, kissed my partner goodnight, and we went our separate ways.
I have read that this is the first case of a stranger abduction and murder in Icelandic history. Not too hard to believe in a country with an average of one murder a year. The whole country basically came together to try to find her. Even though as the days went by, everyone knew it was going to end like this, if there was any closure at all, with a body and not a rescue.
Before I start the next paragraph, I want to be clear about a few things. It is not known how drunk Birna was. There is no indication that she was blacked out or unable to make good choices. It is likely that she was offered a ride and accepted willingly, which is a relatively common thing to do here. Beyond that, even if she was completely incapacitated, I hope it is obvious to anyone who might read this that being drunk in no way transfers blame for what happened to her.
This situation has given me cause to think about the few times I have interacted with women who seemed too drunk to get home on their own. It's only happened twice, that I can think of. In both cases, men were there, seemingly ready to take advantage. Once, it was a girl I had been hanging out with throughout the night, dancing, making out, though we did not know each other. She went from fun tipsy drunk to scary incapacitated drunk very quickly. I walked with her to a taxi, and several times men suggested "oh, I'll take her home" or "I'll take her off your hands" with a laugh. The other time, it was a woman who had passed out in the back of a club, and a guy was putting his hand up her shirt. I yelled at him, and woke her up, and we walked outside. She was angry with me, because once she woke up in the cold air she wanted to go back inside to dance, and there was a line. So I apologized and left. I'd say that in both cases I did just about the minimum a decent person would be obligated to do. And I am sure the kind of predatory behavior I witnessed on those occasions was not the kind of predatory behavior that ends in murders. Maybe it's not relevant at all, but it comes to mind.
I almost feel like I could or should have done something myself. It's the stupidest thought in the world, because I am certain that I would not have even looked twice if I had been out that night and seen Birna walking home, drunk but on her feet, eating a greasy sandwich from the kebab shop. I would have had no reason to suspect she needed any kind of help. She was an adult, walking home after a night out, on a relatively busy street, in a safe city. I am not the only one, of course. In rough translation, one article ended with "By now we all feel that we walked with her that night, impotently following her course, unable to alter it from our vantage in the future."
Icelandic social media tonight is all just single hearts, posted without any other comment.
Walking home tonight, there were candles lit at the spot where she was last seen. A few doors down, a poster still hung in the window asking if anyone had seen her.
I have lived in places where violence and murder were far more common than they are here. But I have never felt as personally affected. She disappeared off a street a few hundred feet from my house, where I walk every single day. On the advice of the police, I checked my basement in case she had just been drunk and tired and trying to find shelter from the bad weather and got to my back door, and as unlikely as it was, my heart broke a little bit to find it empty. This is, both literally and figuratively, very close to home. Last night I got out of a taxi basically at the spot where she disappeared, kissed my partner goodnight, and we went our separate ways.
I have read that this is the first case of a stranger abduction and murder in Icelandic history. Not too hard to believe in a country with an average of one murder a year. The whole country basically came together to try to find her. Even though as the days went by, everyone knew it was going to end like this, if there was any closure at all, with a body and not a rescue.
Before I start the next paragraph, I want to be clear about a few things. It is not known how drunk Birna was. There is no indication that she was blacked out or unable to make good choices. It is likely that she was offered a ride and accepted willingly, which is a relatively common thing to do here. Beyond that, even if she was completely incapacitated, I hope it is obvious to anyone who might read this that being drunk in no way transfers blame for what happened to her.
This situation has given me cause to think about the few times I have interacted with women who seemed too drunk to get home on their own. It's only happened twice, that I can think of. In both cases, men were there, seemingly ready to take advantage. Once, it was a girl I had been hanging out with throughout the night, dancing, making out, though we did not know each other. She went from fun tipsy drunk to scary incapacitated drunk very quickly. I walked with her to a taxi, and several times men suggested "oh, I'll take her home" or "I'll take her off your hands" with a laugh. The other time, it was a woman who had passed out in the back of a club, and a guy was putting his hand up her shirt. I yelled at him, and woke her up, and we walked outside. She was angry with me, because once she woke up in the cold air she wanted to go back inside to dance, and there was a line. So I apologized and left. I'd say that in both cases I did just about the minimum a decent person would be obligated to do. And I am sure the kind of predatory behavior I witnessed on those occasions was not the kind of predatory behavior that ends in murders. Maybe it's not relevant at all, but it comes to mind.
I almost feel like I could or should have done something myself. It's the stupidest thought in the world, because I am certain that I would not have even looked twice if I had been out that night and seen Birna walking home, drunk but on her feet, eating a greasy sandwich from the kebab shop. I would have had no reason to suspect she needed any kind of help. She was an adult, walking home after a night out, on a relatively busy street, in a safe city. I am not the only one, of course. In rough translation, one article ended with "By now we all feel that we walked with her that night, impotently following her course, unable to alter it from our vantage in the future."
Icelandic social media tonight is all just single hearts, posted without any other comment.
Walking home tonight, there were candles lit at the spot where she was last seen. A few doors down, a poster still hung in the window asking if anyone had seen her.