8:44am June 22, 2014

I want everyone to remember Christopher DeGroot the way they remember Katie McCarron.

youneedacat:

Everyone remembers Katie McCarron for reasons that disturb me. Everyone should remember her. That’s not what disturbs me. The reasons that disturb me is that they only remember her because she was young, cute, photogenic, and had grandparents and a father who 100% opposed her murder and worked hard to get publicity for her cause, plus the autistic community took up her cause.

She was murdered in a way that was probably influenced by the Autism Every Day video. Certainly the video was used to defend her murder. But everyone forgets that the same weekend she was murdered, there was another murder, of a man named Christopher DeGroot.

All I know about Christopher is that he was 19 years old and that he loved photography, he went everywhere with a camera taking pictures of things. That’s all I can find out. When I made an online memorial to him and other autistic murder victims on Second Life, I put up a little model of a tripod in his name.

That’s all I can find out because nobody in his family is talking about who he was. His parents locked him in the house, deadbolted the doors and the windows, and set the house on fire. On purpose. Like Katie McCarron, this was doubtless influenced by the Autism Every Day video. He died needlessly and pointlessly.

And now nobody will ever know anything about him.

And most people will forget him because he wasn’t cute and photogenic and he didn’t have other family members standing up in the media to tell his real story.

His parents were charged with arson and manslaughter. For a hate crime.

http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/departments/inclusiondailynews/001098.html

Don’t forget him. Please don’t forget him. I’m tired of people forgetting everyone who doesn’t have the right connections to be seen widely. Years on, everyone still knows Katie McCarron. Years on, nobody knows Christopher DeGroot.

Remember Christopher DeGroot. Remember that he liked cameras and photography. Remember that he was alive. Remember that he died fighting for his life. Remember that he was a human being, not a statistic or a number on a list. Remember that the reason we don’t know more about him is because we live in a horrible, profoundly violent, ableist society that kills people and erases their memory and replaces it with the memory of their murderers.

I remember Christopher. I wish I had more about his life to remember, but I remember him and he’s one of the ones I’ll never be able to forget.

Katie (and the way the community rallied around her and her father and grandfather) is a big part of why I try so hard to remember so much about so many, but he’s a cornerstone for me as well.

The thing that pushed me to list and collect and remember was a hideously ableist newspaper article about how terrible and burdensome we supposedly are, and it used the deaths of several autistic children and young adults to make its point. It went out of its way to erase their lives, even going so far as to avoid using their names, but it was still close enough to their deaths that I could tell who they were talking about. Katie was one of them, and so was Christopher. So were William Lash, Brandon Williams and Ulysses Stable.

I was trembling and nauseous for a long while after reading it, but I made a promise to them and to myself that I wouldn’t let them be erased and forgotten like that. Even if I’m the only one left who does, as long as I live I’ll always remember.