Joran van der Sloot wasn’t known to be violent? Look deeper. Even if you don’t find it, he’s an addict; therefore, anything is possible.
“[Joran] van der Sloot’s past (sic) wasn’t known to be violent.”
So wrote Frank Bajak in an Associated Press piece on the 22-year-old who was arrested for the murder of Stephany Flores, whose body was found in a Peruvian hotel room with her neck broken, one eye dangling from its socket and her bloodied face so battered her brother didn’t recognize her in the morgue. The gruesome murder was committed five years to the day after Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba, where van der Sloot was the main suspect and whose father, who died in January, was a judge. In supporting his headline, Bajak cited the fact that “the only case in the past five years where he’s known to have caused bodily harm was in January 2008,” when he threw a glass of red wine at a reporter who called him a liar. Bajak isn’t looking at the whole picture.
Addicts can be on their best behaviors for years at a time if that’s what it takes to get what they want (in this case, continued freedom from shackles). Like O.J. Simpson, van der Sloot knew he had to be on his best behavior if he hoped to avoid apprehension for a heinous crime after (not) committing one for which he couldn’t be convicted. Except for the one reported act of violence and, oh, by the way, an attempt at extorting funds from the Holloway family in exchange for telling them where they could find the body of the girl he “didn’t” murder, he appears to have managed to stay off the legal radar. (God only knows how many unethical acts, or illegal ones for which he knew he couldn’t be caught, he engaged in over the last five years, but I digress.)
Bajak made two glaring errors in his analysis. First, he simply didn’t go back far enough. In the July 2005 TAR one of the “runners-up” for Top Story was: “The possible culprits in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway after a night out at Carlos’n’Charlie’s on Aruba, particularly the ‘hard drinking, violence-prone’ Joran van der Sloot, who is reported to party every weekend and pick fights while drinking ‘for no reason at all.’ Unfortunately, if there are tracks, alcoholics can be superb at covering them.” Considering he was so hard drinking and prone to violence that even journalists reported the fact when van der Sloot was a teenager, he did a darn good job of covering his tracks and staying off the radar. But as I predicted then and, too, in 1995 when Simpson was acquitted, as long as addicts keep using it’s only a question of time before their behaviors lapse in a way that is likely to again attract the attention of law enforcers.
The second error in Bajak’s thinking gets to the myth: Bajak’s implication is if a suspect wasn’t known to be violent then it’s a surprise when he is. Once we know that a person uses alcohol or other drugs addictively, it shouldn’t be. We know he’s capable of anything. “Anything” includes murder. Properly stated, Bajak should have written (and correcting for the poorly constructed English): “Joran van der Sloot wasn’t known to be violent recently, but since he is a known addict, we knew he was capable of heinous crimes. Unfortunately, he appears to have committed one and, this time, got caught red-handed.”