Three years ago: The Harvey family story

Mother, father and two daughters found brutally slain in their home on New Year's Day. The parents were well known in the local arts/music community. Three years ago at this time of the year, my sense of what a blog could be was altered by the role SLANTblog played in the days after the nightmare story of the murdered Harvey family broke.

Driven by compulsion, to comfort the community of those who were devastated by the tragedy, and perhaps trying to hang on to what remained of my sanity, I wrote and published a series of posts. It was a community that formed out of necessity, out of a collective crying out -- how could this unthinkable crime have happened?

We went to services and we clung to one another, literally and virtually. Some of SLANTblog's readers in that spell, I already knew -- we had many common associations. Other readers found their way to SLANTblog in the fashion of how the Internet works.

Here's the SLANTblog post from Jan. 6, 2006:

The growing display in front of Carytown’s World of Mirth is something to see. To remember the slain Harvey family -- parents: Bryan and Kathy, daughters: Stella and Ruby -- toys, flowers, notes, candles, and all sorts of things have been left off on the sidewalk in front of Kathy’s shop.There’s a large board for people to leave off their written comments. So much of the stuff there was obviously put out by children. Even as still more brutal, hair-raising details about the crime scene itself emerge, the tenderness of what’s on that city sidewalk is palpable.

Click here to read, "The Storm and the Sunlit Painted Ladies," which is a collection of excerpts from that flurry of 2006 posts.

And, to see and hear Bryan Harvey in a television interview I conducted with him and his House of Freaks partner, Johnny Hott, in 1990, click here for Part One at YouTube. Click here for Part Two.

For another perspective on the Harvey family's deaths and the aftermath, click here to go to John Sarvay's Buttermilk & Molasses.

Still remembering...