Young Mother Shot and Killed

23 year old Rachael Myring was shot and killed yesterday, in a murder suicide in a suburban real estate office. The office was also my real estate office. What I didn't know at the time of the incident, and didn't find out until the 6pm news last night, was that I had actually met Rachael Myring once. She was the girl who I signed my current lease with. Even though I only met her the once, she had told me during the course of our short conversation, that her and her partner had just bought a house together. I wasn't aware, though, that she was a mother to a young boy.

From my impression of her, she was a polite girl, full of smiles and genuinely concerned about any gripes I had with the service I had been getting. (The real estate was in the middle of changing hands from one company to another, and I had told her that I hoped the service would get better. It hasn't, but that's not the point.)

Reading the news this morning, I've learned more about the events that took place. The man who killed Rachael and then himself was a tenant who had believed that he had been overcharged in his rent. He was in his 60's, and by all accounts was "a quiet and good neighbour". The shooting was random, in that Rachael wasn't a specific target... she just happened to be the person who was on the desk at the time.

Possibly the saddest part in all of this, as well as the fact that Rachael's murder has left behind a fiance and a young son, was that Rachael was due to move jobs next week. She was getting out of the property management section and moving to finance, "because of who you deal with, to get away from those people", according to one of her colleagues. Even sadder, today (Friday) was her last day in property management.

Feel free to read more details here.

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Now, I know we all live in a crazy world. And, I know I don't live in one of the best suburbs in the world in terms of the population here. (It's apparently one of the worst suburbs to live in, in Brisbane, anyway.) I know real estate offices have a hard job keeping customers happy, what with rising rent and quarterly inspections and such. But what I don't understand in my mind, is how a small dispute over how much rent has been taken out can lead to a murder-suicide. Hasn't anyone heard of TALKING about things? Estate agents are usually supposed to be flexible, and I'm sure if too much rent had been taken out, they could have refunded him, or made other such arrangements. But to kill someone, and then yourself over something like that, is a bit extreme.

I don't know how the other workers in that office are going to deal with this. I don't even know how they are going to face goifng into work today, if at all. I don't even know how Rachael's fiance is going to explain to their little boy that mummy isn't coming home. What I do know, though, is that this incident was senseless, and in a perfect world, it needn't have happened.

But I also know that this world is far from perfect.

(And, as an aside, I now know I never want a job in real estate. That's a crap comment to make, and I'm sort of sorry that I'm making it. But whoever says you don't deal with irate people in a job like that is fooling themselves.)

~Frostilicus~