Schwarzenegger and journalists enable Esteban Nunez and John du Pont.
Enablers of the month:
Outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who reduced the sentence for the son of his good friend Fabian Nunez (who happens to be a business partner of his chief political adviser), Esteban Nunez, in the stabbing death of San Diego State University student Luis Santos after a night of heavy drinking. Even The Los Angeles Times editorialized the partial commutation smelled, pointing out that although Nunez didn’t make the fatal wound, he stabbed two other victims who survived. As The Times reported, “Schwarzenegger issued only 10 commutations during his tenure, and it strains credibility to suppose that Esteban Nunez would have been found worthy of such consideration if his father didn’t have a personal relationship with the governor.” You’ll find our original report on the story in the January 2009 TAR (http://www.preventragedy.com/pages/TAR/045.jan09.html), where Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is quoted as coming to Esteban’s defense, saying he was “a great kid, a good boy.” Yup, until he isn’t, just like almost every other addict.
Journalists with the Associated Press, who couldn’t get themselves to use the word “alcoholic” in reporting the death in prison of John du Pont, one of hundreds of heirs to the du Pont family fortune. We learn in the 7th paragraph that in 1996 du Pont shot and killed David Schultz, a 1984 gold medalist in freestyle wrestling. The 10th paragraph reports that the trial exposed du Pont’s “bizarre, paranoid behavior and his many delusions, including believing that his body was being inhabited by bugs and that he was being spied on.” In the next paragraph we find he had a reputation for acting bizarrely in other ways as well, including driving two new Lincoln Continentals into a pond on his property, one after the other. Finally, in the 12th paragraph, journalists tell us that wrestlers who trained at du Pont’s state-of-the-art Foxcatcher National Training Center alleged that du Pont pointed guns at them, once kicked out a wrestler because he was black and he “drank too much.” Du Pont’s lawyers contended in the murder trial he was insane and (reminiscent of the sort of comments we will likely be seeing regarding this month’s Top Story, Jared Lee Loughner) suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, but we learn in the 14th paragraph a psychiatrist testified that cocaine, “not mental illness,” fueled du Pont’s rampage. Journalists missed the opportunity for a teaching moment by their failure to explicitly state at the get-go that John du Pont, because of his longstanding addiction to alcohol and cocaine, exhibited numerous truly bizarre and destructive behaviors that came to a head in the ultimate tragedy of the shooting death of David Schulz. They might also have explained that alcoholism tends to run in families when reporting that his mother was left to raise du Pont after his father, William du Pont Jr., abandoned the family when John was two years old.