The late Arkansas Sen. Linda Collins-Smith speaking at a 2017 news conference announcing a new law to be signed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson requiring 60,000 state-licensed truckers to complete training in spotting human trafficking.
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Two Republican state senators and two New York City Policemen died violently within 72 hours this week.
1. On June 4, former Arkansas Senator Linda Collins-Smith, 57, was found dead outside her home, her body unrecognizable on discovery. Police are now investigating her death as a homicide. On June 5, the county prosecutor announced that the circuit judge sealed the documents and statements obtained by police.
2. On June 5, Deputy Chief Steven Silks, 62, weeks away from retirement, was found in an unmarked police car with a gunshot wound to the head. News reports reported indicate it seemed self-inflicted.
3. On June 5, former Oklahoma Sen. Jonathan Nichols, 53, was found shot dead in his home. Police have not announced whether they are investigating a suicide or homicide..
4. On June 6, Detective Joseph Calabrese, 58, was found near his police car on a Brooklyn, NY beach, dead of a gunshot wound in what one report called an apparent suicide.
RIP.
Many other Americans died violently this past week. Why link these four together?
The answer comes down to a dark suspicion and a few hard facts which suggest that one or more of these four deaths might have had something to do with these individuals' work against pedophiles and human trafficking, or the official corruption so often surrounding both.
I will note that in both policemen's cases my concern is born mainly of decades of Clinton crime family watcing, which carries with it the hardened aura of many, many unsolved murders and strange deaths that just happened around the Clintons and their scandals. The shock of hearing about not one but two senior policemen supposedly committing suicide within 24 hours in New York made me think, first, how terrible it is that so many policemen end their lives in suicide -- but it also made me wonder about the long, putrid, festering NYPD case of former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop, and how it figured into the endgame of the Clinton campaign, and Crooked Comey's FBI laptop "investigation." Could these deaths be related?
Weiner served 18 months in prison after a plea agreement resulted in his being convicted of a single felony charge of transferring obscene material to a minor. A registered sex offender, Weiner is now divorced from Hillary Clinton's top campaign aide, Huma Abedin, but it is well worth remembering how close these couples once were. Bill Clinton even officiated at the Weiner-Abedin wedding.
After the two policemen's deaths were announced, we learned what fine public servants they were, how shocked their loved ones and colleagues are. The deputy chief was "sad" about retiring, we were told, but suicidal? Maybe so. The reporting is scarce. Trying to understand such pain and waste, it is natural to seek a motive. It is also natural to wonder, at least, if these were really suicides, or possibly murders in disguise. It happens.
Back in the fall of 2016, there were reports of great upset inside the NYPD over an allegedly suppressed investigation of the Weiner laptop. One account of the controversry blindly sourced "detectives" and "a police chief." Silks was a deputy chief. Calabrese was a detective.
From TruePundit (and no, I don't know this source is any more credible than the anonymous sources cited by CNN or the Bezos Post):
NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices.
“What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”
We haven't heard anything more from any of the multiple chiefs (and deputy chiefs) or the thousands of detectives in the NYPD since. Could Silks and Calabreses have possibly been a part of, or, somehow, privy to the Weiner investigation?
It would be public service for the NYPD to establish the answer to the question. Not that I expect the department to do so -- or any other law enforcement or government agency. The last thing authorities in this country do is shed light on, let alone prosecute, any crimes potentially concerning the Clintons. From Monica Petersen in Haiti, to Klaus Eberwein in Miami, from John Ashe in Westchester to to Beranton J. Whisenant Jr. in Miami, the dead bodies of people who see the Clintons and their kind of corruption up close seem to disappear into an especially black hole of forever-cold cases. But natural curiosity, respect for the dead, concern for the living, and, not least, the maintenance of self-respect should drive us to ask more questions. They don't. Everyone is too scared, or sticks to oblivion to avoid becoming too scared.
When we turn to the murder of Collins-Smith in Arkansas and violent death of Nichols in Oklahoma, there is more than suspicion to ponder. In both of these Republican legislators' careers, there is ample evidence of their efforts against human and child trafficking and abuse.
In 2015, Smith-Collins helped preside over stormy hearings into the state Department of Human Services' (DHS) practice of "preventing" grandparents from caring grandchildren whom the state agency preferred to place in foster care. This story caught my eye, having previously heard of Georgia State GOP Sen. Nancy Shaefer, who worked hard to expose and correct the abuses and failures of state child protective services, up to and including child trafficking. In 2010, Shaefer and her husband were found shot to death in what police determined was a "murder-suicide."
In 2017, Smith Collins' bill requiring the 60,000 truck drivers registered in Arkansas to complete training in spotting human trafficking became law.
In 2018, Smith-Collins was pursuing contested or missing millions from the state DHS. We also find her on Twitter, applauding a youth effort against human trafficking.
As far as back 2005, then-Sen. Jonathan Nichols proposed legislation to create a child abuse response team. In 2006, he worked to help pass legislation to give juries the option to impose the death penalty on repeat child molesters.In 2007, Nichols sponsored a bill to "require that any person required to register as a sex offender for an offense committed against a victim less than 14 years of age who fails to register will be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for five years to life." In 2008, the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation honored Nichols for these and other achievements to help law enforcement "fight crimes against children and solve cold cases through expanding the DNA data base."
Due to term limits, Nichols left the Senate in 2013, and most recently was serving as a policy advisor to Oklahoma Senate Speaker Charles McCall.
All of this information may add up to nothing more than testaments to lives lived true, trying in part to help the most precious and helpless among us — our children. These four deaths may be completely unrelated to careers in law enforcement and politics. The murders may have personal motives, or no motives at all. The police suicides may, in fact, be suicides, final blows against inner demons.
Nonetheless, it is hard not to wonder about while grieving families bury their own.