Although I don’t live in Monroe County, I make an effort to stay up-to-date on news from the area since I work there, and I try to integrate my students’ immediate environment and news into my classroom teachings as best I can. Most of them hate writing — and after hearing about their high school experiences, I can hardly blame them — so if they have to write, I try to at least steer them towards topics that they care about, to help them with the difficult task of writing.

This past month, the biggest news story to come from Monroe County was the disappearance of a five-year-old girl by the name of Nevaeh Buchanan. Within the past week the body of a little girl matching Nevaeh’s description was found in a shallow grave near the River Raisin. Although autopsy results are still pending to determine whether or not it is Nevaeh’s body, the press and others are talking about the matter as if it’s already been determined that it is Nevaeh’s body. Monroe County is already a tight-knit community as it is, and the recent economic downturn has hit the region very hard. Under ordinary circumstances, Nevaeh’s murder would be a county-wide tragedy. With the region devastated in so many other ways already, her death has been nothing short of crippling.

All of this would have been bad enough in and of itself. I can’t even begin to imagine how Nevaeh’s parents have felt these past few weeks, questioning every little thing they said and did before Nevaeh’s disappearance, and trying to come to terms with the possibility that their daughter was dead, a possibility that grew as each horrible day passed and they heard no word on their daughter’s whereabouts. The loss of any family member is devastating, but when the family member is so young, it is all the more painful. It is hard to believe that anyone would ever want to compound a grieving family’s death by heaping abuse and scorn on them, especially when the loss is still so fresh, the wounds still open.

Unfortunately, it appears that no one told the Buchanans about Nancy Grace, because they went on her show last night, and Nancy Grace ripped them a new one for what she perceived as their "mistakes" that led to Nevaeh’s disappearance and presumptive death. That Grace has done this before is not news; in fact, in 2006, shortly after Grace pilloried her on national television for supposedly not being open enough about the recent disappearance of her two-year-old son, Melinda Duckett committed suicide. I don’t watch Grace’s show, but I heard of the Duckett incident on other news broadcasts, and I can remember thinking back then that Grace’s conduct was, to say the least, reprehensible. Now it’s hitting home in a way that it didn’t back then, and I can’t recall being this angry at a public figure in years.

That the parents were already second-guessing their actions goes without saying; in the face of any great tragedy, nearly all of us can’t help but question if the tragedy could have been avoided if we’d done even the smallest thing just a little bit differently. It should also go without saying whenever a little boy or girl disappears, the police have to treat the parents as suspects and interrogate them, as best as the circumstances allow, to rule them out as potentially being involved in the disappearance; we have seen it happen enough in the media in the past two decades, and while we recognize that it is a necessary part of police work, that doesn’t mean that we have to be comfortable about it happening. That the Nevaeh Buchanan tragedy serves as a lesson to parents of young children to be more careful about monitoring their children and teaching them to be vigilant about strangers also, quite literally, goes without saying; in all the news stories about Nevaeh’s disappearance, parents and children have been quick to say that they would be a lot more careful about these things from now on.

I do not know what possesses Nancy Grace to think that she should use these tragedies to shout out the lessons to be learned from them that are so obvious, let alone to do so in a way that abuses and humiliates parents who are just coming off of the worst possible tragedy one can imagine young parents could go through. As much as I desire to understand the human mind and all of its facets, there are simply some aspects of it that are too dark, too sadistic for me to want to understand. What Nancy Grace’s motivations for her actions are, I won’t dare to guess and won’t comment on. What I can say beyond any doubt, however, is that her actions themselves are, to put it mildly, monstrous and inhuman. That Nancy Grace was allowed to continue hosting her television show after Melinda Duckett’s suicide is incomprehensible. Now that she has repeated the same actions that led to Duckett’s suicide on another grieving family, I think it is the obligation of every American who has even half a heart to demand that CNN pull Nancy Grace off of its airwaves immediately and permanently. Nancy Grace has the right to say whatever she wants to say about the Buchanan tragedy, but that doesn’t mean CNN, or any other television network, has an obligation to televise such abusive, disgusting behaviour towards grieving parents.