Love, American Style
Last Friday night, Debra Silver was murdered in her apartment by a monster that some in the media – people that I refer to as “hacks” – characterized as a “jealous lover.”
The thing is, I just can’t square the “lover” part of the equation. Because – and maybe I’m just old fashioned – “lovers” don’t come calling with semi-automatic weapons and they don’t shoot the object of their affection in the face.
Anyway, Debra’s story has made national news because a.) not only was she murdered, but her ex-boyfriend Daniel Tedlie, who was also in her apartment, said to be sharing a last meal with her before leaving town for good to take care of his sick mother in Colorado, was also shot and killed that night; and b.) the murderer did society a favor and turned the gun on himself a few moments later. A scene like this is referred to as a “love triangle” by the hacks, making it sound as if it was a show produced by Aaron Spelling in the ‘70s, The Cowsills singing the theme song.
For the New York tabloids, the story was written and sent to the copy desk before the autopsy was even done. It was an incident where “sources say” the jealous “lover” became enraged when he entered his girlfriend’s apartment to find her cooking dinner for another man and kills them both, then takes his own life, presumably distraught over what he had just done. Yep, that story was written before the tabloid hacks even got the address of the building on New York’s Upper West Side right. It didn’t matter – the story wrote itself.
Friends of Debra Silver – including some of her ex-boyfriends like me – silently hoped that the story would disappear the next day, that Alex Rodriguez would finally come through in the clutch and take over the front pages of the Big Apple’s newspapers.
I guess we weren’t the only dopes.
The story, it turns out, had legs. The psycho killer – sorry, “lover” – had a wife and two kids living behind a white picket fence in Glen Ridge, NJ. Debra? Well, she was found to be pregnant, too. We’ll never know who the father was because Debra was buried, in accordance to Orthodox Jewish laws, before sundown the very next day.
That, it turns out, is an unfortunate matter for the hacks. Because you don’t need Encyclopedia Brown to point out that if Debra Silver was shot and killed on Friday night, she couldn’t have been found “cooking” for her ex-boyfriend. She was an Orthodox Jew and they don’t – she didn’t – touch the stove, answer a phone or turn on a light after sundown on Fridays (something to do with “lighting a spark” and resting on the seventh day…honestly, on this part, I’m a little rusty and I’m not looking it up).
So, when I decided to call out the television stations that were all reporting on these knowledgable “sources,” they immediately became defensive: “That’s what the New York papers are reporting,” one TV station anchor snapped at me. “Are you saying we shouldn’t be reporting on the story?”
Actually, I responded, I thought they should report on the story. What they were doing – as they admitted – was reporting on what some hack said, and not the story. (That’s why all of the news reports described her one bed, one bath condominium as a “posh pad.” How “Sex in the City” of them.)
Did I know anything about the story? Well, I knew enough to know it wasn’t a love story, and that Debra likely aided and abetted her own death by letting the guy into her apartment in the first place.
So yeah… I got a few of the stories taken offline, I got a few “you’re rights” from a few news editors in a few upstate TV stations. I figured that’s how I could best help. But it really doesn’t matter – Debra Silver was done wrong and Debra Silver is dead.
Call it what you want, but don’t call it “love.”
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