The Other Way Around

Suppose it had been the other way around.

Suppose Maura Murray had been hit by a car on Triangle Street in Amherst and left hospitalized in critical condition, barely clinging to life for days or weeks.

Suppose Petrit Vasi’s car was found a few days later, abandoned in NH, with unexplained body damage that was very likely sustained before he mysteriously left Amherst in a hurry.

And suppose Petrit Vasi’s car had been discovered in NH before Amherst police had found even their first lead in their investigation of the hit-and-run of Maura Murray.

Would Amherst police then have dropped the investigation into the hit-and-run of an all-American white woman so fast?

Would Amherst police then not have immediately requested from NH authorities a more vigorous search for this non-resident suspect?

Would NH police then not have looked east on Rt. 112 for Vasi?

Would Amherst (and possibly UMass) detectives themselves then not have shown up in Haverhill NH – say, on Tuesday morning?

Would Amherst police then not have tried to get the FBI more involved?

Would Petrit Vasi have ever, after crashing his mother’s Corolla into a Hadley guardrail while drunk, been allowed to leave the scene un-arrested?

Would the New Hampshire League of Investigators ever have investigated the mysterious disappearance of a missing, non-resident, male UMass student?

Would the New Hampshire League of Investigators ever have given psychic/medium Maureen Hancock an award for her assistance in the disappearance of Petrit Vasi?

Would the disappearance of Petrit Vasi ever have ignited hundreds of thousands of posts and comments all across Social Media for thirteen years?

Would online curiosity about the possible connection between the hit-and-run of Maura Murray and the subsequent disappearance of Petrit Vasi have met such desperate resistance?

Would Social Media have ever paid even scant attention to the disappearance of Petrit Vasi?

Would the disappearance of Petrit Vasi have ever been granted even a tiny fraction of the same publicity, the same attention, that has been given to Maura Murray’s disappearance for thirteen years?


If it had been the other way around, if Maura Murray had been struck by an unknown driver and Petrit Vasi had disappeared a few days later, his car found abandoned in NH, then you can bet the case would have been investigated very, very differently right from the start, when it counted most.

If it had been the other way around, police would never have been able to cleverly turn the hit-and-run case of a male immigrant UMass student into an instance of Missing White Woman Syndrome.

Had police pursued Maura Murray right away, exactly as they would have pursued Petrit Vasi if their identities were reversed, then everything might now be quite different indeed.

Although it may be way too late to find out who hit Petrit Vasi and what really happened to Maura Murray, it is not too late to hold Massachusetts police accountable for their own failure in the hours immediately following the disappearance of Maura Murray.

If anyone wants to point a finger at the negligence of law enforcement, point it at the police departments of Amherst, UMass, and Hadley Massachusetts – for allowing rampant bigotry to throttle what could have been an impartial, and therefore successful, investigation.

And, not so incidentally, for their failure to inform New Hampshire State Police of the true reason Maura Murray was allowed to leave the Hadley Corolla crash un-arrested.

Chief Michael R. Kent, QAnon, and the Alt-right

Re-tweet by Chief Michael Kent, Burlington MA Police Department

Mike Kent left the Amherst Police Department as a captain in 2010 to become chief of the Burlington MA Police Department. He was, just prior to his departure from Amherst, a contender for the APD chief's job, which went to Scott Livingstone. 

I think at one point Kent more or less oversaw (in much the same way Jennifer Gundersen has) the 2004 Petrit Vasi hit-and-run investigation. Kent may not have actively investigated the case himself, but he was at least quite familiar with it.

Usually, I'm wary of reading too much into a re-tweet like the one above, which seems relatively innocuous at first glance, but I don't think it's out of bounds to question Kent's (and by extension, Amherst PD's) impartiality when it comes to handling cases in which the victim is a refugee or immigrant - like Petrit Vasi.

There are, after all, many other comparisons Kent could have used or re-tweeted in order to champion more funds for homeless vets.

Why, in this re-tweet, are refugees represented as a threat to homeless veterans? Why not say that the cost of subsidizing a farmer, for example, could go toward housing a homeless vet? Why not provide a whole range of government expenditures that could be cut in order to help homeless vets? 

Why the either/or, oppositional construction of the statement? Why refugess v. veterans?

Doesn’t the original tweet contend that by accepting refugees – specifically refugees - we are therefore turning away homeless vets?

Isn’t Kent maliciously spreading the fake notion that refugees are preventing the U.S. government from helping homeless vets? 

Isn’t Kent, even in a re-tweet, using homeless vets as a way to dump on (mostly Muslim) refugees?

Didn't Kent merely use homeless vets as a way of saying refugees are unwelcome - which is simply code for outright bigotry and ethnic prejudice?

It represents a racist false equivalency, similar to this recent instance at the Hadley Police Department.


What did Kent mean when he said, as reported by the Burlington Patch, that Burlington was a "very patriotic town?" As opposed to what? Other towns are not patriotic? Nearby Lowell, for example, with its Cambodian population? Sanctuary cities?

What kind of message does Kent's re-tweet convey? What kind of action do statements like Kent's inspire? What kind of illegal acts are given a wink and a nod when a police chief re-tweets #PodestaEmails, which led to the gunfire of PizzaGate? Or more things, like this vandalism at Burlington's Islamic Center? Or even worse?

Vandalism at Islamic Center, Burlington MA. Patriotic vandalism?

I have to think Kent is all too aware of exactly what he re-tweeted, that he deliberately spread the coded hatred and racial prejudice of the alt-right; that he's deliberately using his position as a police chief to bad-mouth refugees.

What about refugees from the Balkans, many of whom were Muslim? How did they fit into Kent's world-view back in early 2004 when he was at Amherst Police Department, when Petrit Vasi was struck by a hit-and-run driver? Less than one year after the U.S. invaded Iraq? When xenophobic war fever was running high indeed?

It should also be noted that the Podesta-emails hashtag in Kent's re-tweet was prominently related to the alt-right's utterly false, fake-news conspiracy theory about a (Hillary and Bill) Clinton orchestrated pedophile ring located at a pizza shop in Washington DC known as PizzaGate which, according to police, Edgar Maddison Welch "self-investigated" with a rifle - a rifle he discharged twice inside the restaurant. Over past couple of years, it has come be known as QAnon or Q. This is a totally false belief system that apparently Mike Kent - a police chief! - believes in.

UPDATE: Here's a short paragraph from a 02 August 2018 NBC News piece about what #PodestaEmails really means, including its connection to the more recent, and very disturbing, Qanon phenomenon: 

In December 2016, Edgar M. Welch entered a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor and demanded access to a basement that did not exist. He believed the restaurant was part of a child sex ring, a conspiracy known as Pizzagate. Conspiracy theorists on Reddit and 4chan posted that readers could uncover a child sex ring in the hacked emails of John Podesta — if only one were to replace words like “pizza” with “little girl.”

Is this what a police chief should be publicly connecting himself to?

So, why Kent's re-tweet? The two hashtags are clearly alt-right stuff, which absolutely no police chief should ever associate him/herself with. Not in these times. Not in any times.

If Kent thinks this kind of attitude, as exemplified in his re-tweet, is helpful in serving the immigrant or refugee community of Burlington - and especially the Muslim community - he is very, very wrong. It serves no community of any kind well at all.

And if Kent thinks his re-tweet of alt-right crap won’t be perceived as having interfered with the impartial investigation of crimes when he was at Amherst – cases in which the victim was not an all-American white person – then he is still very, very wrong.

But Kent is not the only one who seems to have aligned himself with the alt-right. A surprisingly high percentage of both licensed or sworn investigators and posters in the online conversation about Maura Murray’s disappearance also identify closely with the alt-right.

With investigators like these on the case, little wonder the Vasi hit-and-run was quickly transformed into an early version of Missing White Woman Syndrome - complete with malicious lies whispered by police to their naive Social Media mouthpieces.

Surprises me how many leading Maura Murray "investigators," of various kinds, sworn and not, share the same view as that expressed by Healy (a retired NH State Police lieutenant) in the above screen-shots.

Added 04 November 2018: And then there's this anti-Semitic meme tweeted by a gun-toting conspiracy theorist and so-called citizen detective in the Maura Murray case. (Who, like so many others, was once a police officer.)

Added 20 April 2019:

This is very saddening, but it's become abundantly clear to me that the comment below is the latest retaliation by the general law enforcement (LE) community and their affiliates, formal and informal, active and retired, for the above post and others like it that have appeared on both this blog and on its sister blog. LE would be hard pressed to explain it otherwise. They've been invited several times to try, but have always declined.

Lt John Scarinza: Out of the Loop?

From James Renner's blog, 08 January 2012

Almost eight years after Petrit Vasi was hit, Lt. John Scarinza - now retired, but the original New Hampshire State Police lead investigator on the Maura Murray case - still was not told why Maura wasn't arrested for drunk driving at the scene of the Hadley Corolla crash?

Isn't that what Scarinza is saying? That he, Scarinza, knew about the Corolla crash, that he had every reason to believe Maura could have been arrested for OUI but mysteriously wasn't, and, for some reason, NHSP was never told why?

Isn't that what Scarinza is really telling Renner here? That NHSP was kept in the dark by Hadley/UMass/Amherst police? That he knows someone intervened at the Corolla crash, but NHSP was never told why?

Scarinza is no rookie, and no dummy. He knows everything about talking to journalists. Has for years.

So, was withholding information like this from NHSP, the agency most responsible for finding Maura Murray, some kind of new technique used by Amherst police to investigate the Vasi hit-and-run? Just dump it in New Hampshire's lap and hope Maura magically returns?

How did a potential fugitive from Massachusetts - in one day! - turn into a missing person in New Hampshire?

How, exactly, did the Vasi investigation so quickly morph into yet another example of Missing White Woman Syndrome?