The murder happened first (duh), but I’ll start with the funeral.
The Funeral
Thousands of people attended the memorial services for Officer Gordon Beesley, who had been the School Resource Officer at my children’s middle school. I’m tempted to say 5,000, but my estimation could be off by a little or a lot in either direction. At least half of the attendees in the megachurch were men and women in uniform. The rest were friends of the Beesley family and members of the school community.
The service lasted more than 2 hours and was brilliantly done. It reversed what I’d been doing all week — thinking of Officer Beesley’s death — and took it back to where our attention belonged, on his life.
Middle school years are rough. They were rough when I was young, and they’re even rougher now with all the modern ways tweenagers can take out their angst on each other.
Enter School Resource Officer Gordon Beesley
Every middle schooler should have an Officer Beesley assigned to them. My kids did. Many of their friends did, too.
Like Mikah in this video, who was at the same school at the same time as my own children. This is a remarkable story of an exemplary School Resource Officer, of an amazing human being đź —đź —.
So typical Officer Beesley.
My family needed Officer Beesley on occasion. There were days when going to school seemed insurmountable. There were days when high emotions made thinking and behaving well impossible.
To launch the probe into her closed adoption, Julie McGue first needed the support of her twin sister. They made a pact: Julie would approach their adoptive parents for the adoption paperwork and investigate search options, and the sisters would split the costs involved to locatie their birth relatives. But their adoptive parents weren’t happy that their daughters want to search for their birth parents — and that was only the first of many obstacles Julie would come up against as she dug into her background.
Lisa gives me a warm hug, and I introduce her to Jenny. “This is my twin sister.”
Jenny laughs and glances over at me. “About a month ago, we learned through DNA testing that we’re identical.” This isn’t a setup. Jenny and I hadn’t planned on bringing this up today.
