Huffington Post
By Steven Petite
July 28, 2015
Yesterday,
roughly five miles from where I grew up, a woman was killed in her own
home. Margaret "Peggy" Kostelnik, a 60-year-old resident of Concord,
Ohio, was found
by her husband, William. She was an employee of the neighboring city of
Willoughby for twenty-seven years, and most recently, was the assistant
of Mayor David Anderson. Anderson remarked, "I was thinking this
morning, Peggy Kostelnik might be the nicest person
I've ever met." Now, that beautiful person is gone, taken from this
world in the place where she should have been the safest: her own home.
The
Concord/Mentor area of Northeast Ohio is a quiet, middle class suburb
of Cleveland. For perspective, in recent years, many rankings had Mentor
as one of the top 100
places to live in the nation. Housed in Lake County where the amount of
lives taken by violence each year, can normally be counted on two
hands, the events that took place in my hometown, showed that the
senseless violence that seems all too common across
the nation, is even permeating into family oriented suburbs.
It
all started yesterday morning, when a 14-year-old girl was able to
escape from her uncle who was allegedly trying to rape her. She called
911 from a nearby veterinary
office. Thankfully, she was not physically hurt, and was able to
identify the suspect. After searching the park where the incident
occurred and finding no trace there or at the suspect's home,
Painesville police acquired a warrant for the suspect's arrest.
With
the suspect still at large, police received a report a few hours later
that a woman, who had been walking with her two children on the Greenway
Corridor, a trail
that connects Concord and Painesville, had been shot. The suspect fired
even after the woman claimed that she was with her kids. He reportedly
fired a total of five shots. She was hit in the arm, but again,
thankfully, she and her children will be okay.
Unfortunately,
the suspect fled successfully until shortly after the news of the fatal
shooting of Peggy Kostelnik was discovered. A group of 50 law
enforcement officials
found the suspect along a large embankment, and while the suspect fired
at police, no one was injured. Officers returned fire but the suspect
ducked behind cover and was then surrounded and arrested on the scene,
putting an end to the terror and violence that
he unleashed over the course of the day.
Multiple
families were personally afflicted by these despicable and
unexplainable actions, and one beautiful woman lost her life. The only
word that comes to mind is senseless.
What
makes yesterday's events even more unsettling is that the suspect had
been stopped three weeks ago for a traffic violation and it was
discovered that he was living
in the United States illegally. After police spoke with him, Border
Patrol contacted the suspect as well, but no detainer was issued for
him. He had been living in the country for five years, undocumented, and
little besides that is known. The suspect does
not speak English, and has no prior criminal record that is known as of
yet. It is because of his apparent clean status, that he was not
apprehended by authorities after investigating his status as an American
citizen.
Immigration
laws and reform are testily debated across the United States, mostly in
states along the Mexican border like California, New Mexico, Arizona
and Texas, along
with Florida. However, the debate is a national issue with populations
migrating from those states up north and into places like Painesville,
Ohio. Most people have an opinion on whether or not illegal immigrants
should be allowed to stay in the United States,
and since we are supposed to live in a nation that prides itself on
free speech, each person is entitled to their views, however different
they may be from their neighbor's thoughts.
In
this particular case, the system has failed. There are without question
illegal immigrants that try to be upstanding members of society, but
the man who allegedly terrorized
my hometown was not one of them. He slipped through the cracks. After
Border Patrol was contacted and he was deemed okay to stay in Northeast
Ohio, he was free to commit these heinous crimes against upstanding
American citizens. When someone is deemed to be
an illegal immigrant, and that was determined from a case of probable
cause not from racial profiling or immigration laws like the ones that
were fervently debated in Arizona, a thorough investigation of what they
are actually doing in America, at the very
least, should be performed.
One
cannot help but think that a man who was capable of such an act would
raise some red flags during an investigation as to his reasons for
residing in the states and
his day to day life. It is quite obvious, that this man who more
fittingly can be described as a monster, should not have been simply
brushed off as an illegal immigrant without a criminal record. The
suspect has a criminal record now, and with a $10 million
bond and multiple felony charges incoming, he will likely never be a
free man again. His crimes took away the basic freedoms of the citizens
in this community, and the life of an innocent woman. Hopefully, the
families affected by this tragedy can find peace
with time, and may Peggy Kostelnik rest peacefully.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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