This headline is
blatantly misleading:
ANTI-CENSUS SENTIMENT
The recent hanging death of a census taker highlights growing
controversies around the census.
The "hook" of Eve Conant's story is an
unjustified assumption that Bill Sparkman's death in Clay
County, Ky., was related to the 51-year-old's part-time job as a
Census worker -- although the motive is unknown, no suspects
have been identified, and law enforcement officials refuse to
speculate about the case.
As a matter of fact, the dead man's 19-year-old son,
Josh -- who was adopted as an infant by the unmarried Sparkman
before he moved to Kentucky -- has complained that Kentucky State
Police and other authorities refuse to
rule out suicide as a cause of death:
"I look at it as disrespectful to be still throwing suicide and
accident around," Josh Sparkman told The Associated Press in a
phone interview Tuesday. "He didn't do this to himself. That's
dishonorable. My dad was a good man. No person on this planet
is going to fight cancer like he did, then turn around and kill
himself a year or so later."
Furthermore, the coroner and state medical examiner have ruled
that Sparkman's death was caused by
asphyxiation, without saying whether this was due to
the rope around his neck. His mouth was reportedly gagged
with a cloth, bound with duct tape, and this may well have caused
Sparkman's death although, again, it's important to emphasize
that officials in Kentucky refuse to confirm or deny key details
of the case.
However, officials have indicated that it was not a
"hanging death" -- Sparkman's body was in contact with the ground
when it was found, nude except for a pair of socks, according to
the man who discovered the body. The rope around
Sparkman's neck was tied to a tree limb, so as to suspend his
body upright, but he wasn't dangling in mid-air.
Baseless speculation about this case -- and particularly, the
attempt by some to make a political
symbol of Sparkman's death -- was what motivated me to
travel
this past week to Kentucky, where I spent three days in Clay
County and neighboring Laurel County, where Sparkman lived.
The involvement of the FBI in the case has resulted in an almost
complete official silence from state and local law enforcement.
However, residents of the area (including local journalists
I interviewed at length) are profoundly skeptical of any
suggestion that Sparkman was killed because of general
"anti-government sentiment" (as the
Associated Press was first to suggest) or the more specific
"anti-Census sentiment" that is the subject of this
Newsweek story.
"He knocked on the wrong door," was the way one resident
described what most locals familiar with the case consider
the most likely scenario for Sparkman's killing. As the
Newseek story notes, eastern Kentucky is known as a
haven of marijuana growers. The weed growers plant their crops in
Daniel
Boone National Forest, which sprawls across the mountainous
region and encompasses half of Clay County,
What would be proven if we knew (as we do not) that Sparkman
was engaged in Census work at the time of his disappearance --
most likely Sept. 9, three days before his body was discovered in
the
Hoskins family cemetery some 30 miles east of his home
-- and "knocked on the wrong door"?
If the fatal door he knocked on was at the home of a marijuana
grower or a drug dealer (methamphetamine and other
drugs are also problems in the region), who killed him
after mistaking Sparkman's federal identification as evidence
that the stranger was a narcotics agent, is that an
"anti-government" or "anti-Census" motive? Or is it merely a
criminal seeking to prevent detection of his crimes -- the kind
of killing that happens with unfortunate frequency in America all
the time?
That, however, is strictly a hypothetical scenario. The haste of
some journalists and bloggers to attribute Sparkman's
mysterious death to a particular motive -- to give it a
political meaning -- based on speculation and
assumptions, is irresponsible in the extreme.
In a Sept.
28 front-page news article in the London (Ky.)
Sentinel-Echo, the newspaper's managing editor Joseph Deal
interviewed Kentucky State Police spokesman Don Trosper. Some
widely quoted news accounts of Sparkman's death were based
on "pure speculation," Trooper Trosper told Deal:
Trosper said it is official KSP policy "not to discuss ongoing
investigations, especially specific evidentiary information. We
will not talk about an investigation just to give information
out there that could jeopardize the investigation. Our
primary function is to investigate cases and bring positive
results. A secondary function is things such as media
contacts."
Trosper said he could not estimate how long the investigation
would take, other than to say that "the investigation is
ongoing and our officers are investigating it daily."
He said leaks, especially the dissemination of incorrect
information, can be damaging to any investigation.
"Misinformation is much more damaging to our
investigation than the correct or no information," he
said. (Emphasis added.)
Bill Sparkman is dead, the investigation of his death
is already three weeks old, and if this mysterious case is ever
going to be solved, it won't be solved by uninformed
speculation.
