In “life under Lurie’s Dome” news, the Lincoln Street Savers will put damn near anything on those shelves. Never change.
God the news about Dolly hit hard.
I had a moment yesterday with this one...
...chills, man. “Singing” doesn’t encompass what Dolly at her best does. Did. Shit...
In 2023 I wrote a travel essay on this newsletter, while out on the road up in Canada with High Command, that remains one of the pieces I’m most proud of far as the craft of writing goes. A lot of it ended up being about Dolly, about how catching the song above by chance on a long drive through the Canadian hinterlands between Quebec City and Montreal was something of a psychic reset.
Dolly Parton’s “Here I Am” is on the stereo now as we’re driving through the countryside.
Her voice trilling and freakishly beautiful and all the trees have that little splash of yellow they get in the rain and the rivers are so blue they’re black running hard and fast and textured by little white caps cresting up against the rocks. That feeling of being close to poetry I felt in the parking lot is back now. With these rivers and these trees it’s always gone like this, some immortality we can’t perceive as such, and it’s never given a shit about any of us and it’s never needed us and it’s never considered us. Not when it was fur trappers way back when, not when it’s bands on tour now. We kill each other and climb for power and control and the only thing the river ever feels is our blood seeping to the groundwater and the industrial waste we’ve dumped and our foolish attempts at controlling its flow. Otherwise we don’t matter.“I can help you find what you’re looking for,” Dolly sings in that lilting effortless tambre and it slices through me like a soft cheese.
She’s one of those singers that can pull so deep from an interior world it drags you inside in such a way it convinces you it’s your world, not hers. But really she owns the thing you’re just renting. She sings “here I am” and you just have to believe it. She’s there. You don’t have a say in it. And you’re there too but not where you really are. You’re where she is. That’s the power in her voice.
You can read the rest here: “There’s a lightness of spirit in that I’d take it as a real complement if you do that and don’t come back for the Usual Bullshit. Though as I’ll get to the past week was far from usual.
One more note on Dolly this factoid, taken from some sort of poll conducted a few months ago on the favorability ratings of all manner of household names, is wild.
Barack Obama scored a net favorability rating of 14, Volodymyr Zelenskyy managed a 13, Taylor Swift, surprisingly or not, came in at 3. Parton scored a whopping 65, with 70 percent of respondents viewing her favorably against only 5 percent viewing her unfavorably.
Now that we’re in a world without Dolly it’s worth thinking about why it is that she remained a unifying figure, how despite being unabashedly political she was never made fodder for the culture war. The simple gut-feeling truth in her voice plays a part, I think. Like I said earlier, “singing” doesn’t cut it.
Anyway, to business. The headline today is a Lungfish song that makes for a nice musical accompaniment, I think, to today’s piece.
And before I go any further, local alternative journalism is an extremely dumb way to try to make a living but here I am and this outlet needs you to take out a paid subscription for it to keep existing.
Black Helicopters
Since the news broke a week ago that a police officer was killed and his wife was on the run, I’ve written and scrapped three full stories. This is a tough one, and a weird one, and while I’ve made my antipathy toward the WPD well known over the years I don’t think this story is the appropriate place to ladle any more of it out. We simply don’t know enough about the specific circumstances to apply any analysis to it.
The amount of fruitless, or, rather, as-of-yet fruitless reporting I’ve done on that story since it broke last Tuesday... none of it is solid as of yet. The thought of injecting something speculative, ‘not solid’ as they say, into the insane rumor mill surrounding this story feels irresponsible. So instead, I’m going to provide a list of facts, in timeline fashion, in an effort to show what we know, what we don’t, and what we’ve been made to assume but do not know. Yesterday, the police brass and the DA gathered in front of the police station for a relatively short a deeply uneasy press conference. We’ll get to that, but not before setting it up with good information.
But it wasn’t just the event itself, the death of Kurt and Karen Solomon rippled out into local politics at a critical juncture, and it will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
What I’m saying is we need to take seriously the information we insert into, and, more importantly, withhold from The Discourse when we find ourselves in the midst of A Situation. A great example of what not to do came courtesy of Aidan Kearney, who parachuted in after so many years away to pull a classic Turtleboy, reporting out that the police had found her last Tuesday, just hours after the story broke, and a full six days before employees of Fairlawn Rehabilitation would find her body in nearby woods and report the sighting to police.
One of the biggest fuck-ups in recent memory, resulting in this hilarious screenshot...
...and also our freshman District 5 City Councilor Jose Rivera taking pride in violating the community standards of Nextdoor?
...the narrative leaped again to that of a killer wife found dead in nearby God’s Acre, a plot of conserved woodlands off Mill Street that is home to the “deed rock,” a flat piece of stone chiseled into a quasi-legal document by members of an end-of-days cult in Worcester’s past. (The Dome is real and it is old.)
Animating this entire story as it has so far developed is a profound and uniquely American sexism. We’ve been only nudged into a position we bend toward naturally: the woman, so accused, must be punished in a way we can watch. Witch to the pyre in the village square. The narrative tension of this particular story, so integral to the Massachusetts id, only resolves one way... and having seemingly done so in this case, when earlier this week the chief of police pronounced the case a “tragic murder suicide,” it becomes even more important to untangle the underlying narrative sway.
And like witches snatching babies the Karen Solomon story is just that: a story.
There is the real life tragedy of the unexpected death and possible killing of a father and husband, and a wife who possibly subsequently took her own life. The two sons and their extended family facing lives certainly forever changed. Then there’s the story, layered on top of it, saturating The Discourse. Not a who-dun-it but a why’d-she-do-it. And that’s what I’m talking about.
The story is necessarily bound to the fact this father and husband was a police officer: a social status that, like the witch, confers its own massive library of narrative assumptions. The “police officer” is just as foundational to Massachusetts’ culture as the witch, its spirit, collective brain disease... its ‘thing.’ Why we’re like this. And so we see in this moment a sort of explosive collision of our second and third most resonant narrative traditions. (#1 being Tommy Brady, obviously.)
The Karen Solomon story has an undeniable magnetism. But we have to keep in mind that what makes it magnetic is not the real life tragedy that occurred in the early morning hours last Tuesday on Wildwood Avenue, rather it’s in the fictions we imbued on it, implicitly as much as explicitly, collectively and individually, in the hours and days that followed. We do that impulsively, as human beings, as consumers in a mass consumer culture, as attendants to The Spectacle, really for no other reason than to satisfy our ennui, I think.
The more interesting question to be asking yourself right now isn’t ‘Why’d she do it?’ but rather ‘Why do I think she did it?’ Because, on the one hand, I do personally think she did it. I can’t help it I just do. And, on the other, I find it darkly fascinating to consider why that is. Because I know probably more than your average news consumer about the events that unfolded in the early morning hours of Tuesday, August 18, in and behind that modest brick home on a street of modest homes off Webster Square, and the speculative threads that have been spun from the rumor mill since. It has been the subject of most of my working hours over the past week. And I know very little that I can say with hand over heart is true.
With the facts we have available, minus the manipulations layered over it by the police and the cable news, it would seem just as reasonable that Kurt Solomon took his own life and that Karen Solomon, realizing that, had a mental break, and fled as a simple impulse response, then continued to flee upon realizing she’d been slapped with the scarlet letter. It is also possible Kurt was killed by someone else, which wouldn’t change much on the Karen side of things, and would make her taking off abruptly a more rational behavior. I don’t believe either of those scenarios to be true, but I’m articulating them to emphasize that what we currently generally believe is also not true, categorically.
Let’s list the facts in timeline fashion...
Tuesday, August 18
5:31 a.m. — Dispatcher calls officers to 217 Wildwood Ave. “Resident stated there’s a male laid out in her back yard, unknown breathing.”
5:42 a.m. — First officer on the scene reports that the man is “covered completely in blood” with “laceration to the neck.” Another reports blood on the side of the house and the back door. At this point the officers are unsure of whether there’s anyone inside the house.
5:45 a.m. — The dispatcher starts calling Karen Solomon’s cell phone. It rings but no one picks up.
5:48 a.m. The dispatcher conducts a search of MasterCARD, a system police use to track available information on people and addresses. It pings back that police were dispatched to the house in 2020, but nothing else.
5:49 a.m.— An officer in the house reports blood in the bathroom.
5:50 a.m. — A police officer addresses another by a first name that’s hard to make out. “Call my phone when you get a second.” “You got it,” the other officer said.
5:53 a.m. — Dispatcher confirms that the caller is Karen Solomon, though they remain unsure of whether she was, as she said, the resident.
5:53 a.m. — Another officer, who hasn’t been heard from on the matter as of yet, tells the officers on scene to “use caution” because there is a male with a handgun permit tied to the address.
6:04 a.m. — Officer on scene requests the dispatcher call the number again.
6:12 a.m. — “Can you try running a ping on that phone number?” “W’re running a ping on that phone and I’ll keep you guys updated.”
6:25 a.m. – They learn that one vehicle is in the shop and the other is in the house’s garage.
6:26 a.m. — The ping returned to a roughly 500 meter radius of nearby Vermont Avenue. Several officers reported searching the area, but said they found nothing. Vermont Avenue is a small street, about 300 meters from 217 Wildwood Ave.
The officers remained there until about 8 a.m., when they were called back to the house.
After that the scanner chatter quiets down.
At 11:41 a.m. the story broke publicly by way of a BOLO text alert issued by the Worcester Police Department.
Worcester Police are requesting assistance in locating Karen Solomon regarding the death of a male at her residence. Karen is a 58 year old white female with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing pajama shorts and a tank top, on foot in the area of Westcott St. There is concern she may be armed. Please contact 911 if you see her.
Despite not saying what she was armed with, it quickly spread through the rumor mill she had a knife. Which, in the end, she did not. Where that came from I remain unsure.
A few hours later, none other than Tommy Duffy the II broke the news, posturing machismo for the cable news crews as he announced that the dead man was 31-year WPD officer Kurt Solomon.
Shortly after, at about 5:15 p.m., a more official press conference with the police chief and district attorney took place.
During, the DA listed a dizzying amount of local, state and federal law enforcement resources dedicated to the search:
A Customs and Border Patrol helicopter, “every asset of the WPD,” the state police officers assigned to the DA’s office, the Mass State Police Air Wing, the Mass State Police Search Team, the state police field troops, the state police dive team, the fusion center, the state police k9 unit, the WPD k9 unit, department of homeland security investigations office, the US Marshalls. The manhunt would go on for another six days until Karen Solomon was found by employees of a nearby rehabilitation center.
5:30 p.m. — With a city council meeting imminent, set to center around the de-proposing of a civilian review board, the coalition for a CRB put out a statement saying they were holding off. Around the same time, the mayor put out a statement saying the item would be held, and requested that people do not show up to speak about a civilian review board. The only person who did was the only person who would: David Webb.
6 p.m. — At the meeting vice chairman Khrystian King tried to get the council to postpone the meeting fully. He failed to reach the eight votes apparently needed to do so. Before casting his “no” vote, Councilor Moe Bergman said “no one asked us to cancel,” a statement which implies an awful lot that I don’t have the space to get into.
Later in the meeting, the council voted against King’s proposal to put up signs up on city property stating the locations can’t be used for civil immigration enforcement by the ICE and other federal agencies in the wider mass deportation machine.
In casting his predictable “no” vote, Bergman invoked the “rapists and murderers” trope, a gross thing to do on any day but especially the same day that a city employee was found covered in blood from a gash in his neck, laying dead in his back yard.
“I don’t want to be answering the family whose family member got raped or murdered or assaulted that we prevented the federal authorities from stopping that person from committing the crime because there was kind of this free zone on Worcester property where, even though they were present, nobody could go after them,” said Bergman.
What to say but ‘what an asshole.’ Bergman was joined by Toomey, Mitra, Rosen and Rivera in opposition to King’s signs order. Economou was absent. At 5-5 the vote failed.
The council also voted to appoint former Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson to the Worcester Redevelopment Authority despite the fact there is an open investigation into bigoted comments she made about former City Councilor Thu Nguyen–a fact the manager confirmed just minutes before they voted her through. Before casting his predictable yes vote on the appointment, Bergman tried to make the point that allegations are not convictions. But what came out of his mouth was way dumber than that.
“All of us in public office have allegations that people that don’t like us every day on Facebook,” he said.
Allegations that people don’t like us. God, what an asshole.
We know he’s dumb and cruel and that there’s no point in arguing with him. More than he doesn’t know, he doesn’t care what he’s saying. But allow me a quick little rejoinder:
ICE deportation proceedings are far more often than not initiated on people who’ve been accused of no crime at all. Others, like Rosane Ferreira De Oliveira, are initiated on people with open court cases that, like Rosane’s, are of the low level misdemeanor variety, and often get dropped. We saw up close how ICE threw around “violent criminal illegal” to support their behavior on Eureka Street and how they refused to take it back once it was clear De Oliveira was not violent, a criminal, nor here illegally. Only 5 percent of the people ICE has rounded up during Trump II have had serious convictions. The other 95 percent are like Rosane. But hey. Candy gets the benefit of the doubt but all those people? Can’t stick our neck out for them.
The main point: the city council used the event of Kurt Solomon’s death to ram through two notably unpopular votes, one for the benefit of ICE and the other for the benefit of a local powerbroker who went around city hall calling a non-binary colleague “It.”
Also on Tuesday, Tom Marino over at This Week In Worcester put up an extremely interesting bit of inside baseball: the executive committee of the Worcester Regional Research Bureau called an emergency meeting last October to vote against the release of the civilian review board report. “Suppression of WRRB CRB Report Stopped by 1 Vote.” The backlash was, apparently, per the reporting, and also obviously, per everything else he did and continues to do, led by Tim Murray. It was nearly successful, coming within just one vote. Paul Matthews of the WRRB to his great credit stood his ground. I seem to remember Murray’s comments after the report released including a line about how he wasn’t consulted and didn’t know it was coming out. Lemme check...
Ah yup, in a statement he released after the report came out, which is now 404’d on the chamber’s website, Murray said the board “does not receive notice about when reports are being issued, nor are we solicited for input on potential research topics.”
Wow, Tim, way to super publicly lie for no reason!
And that, folks, was only Tuesday.
Quick break to say I busted ass on this and this coverage is unlike most of what you’ve probably read. That’s what alternative local media is all about, baby. Please consider a a subscription so I can afford to treat this outlet as my full time job, putting in the days of work required of a single post the way I write them. This one was about eight full days.
Wednesday, Aug. 20
On Wednesday morning Karen Solomon remained at-large. Police used the cable outlets, eager as they were for more witch content, to blast out new Ring camera footage recovered of Solomon walking, as if in a daze, through neighbors’ yards.
Later in the afternoon, police officers got a tip about a woman walking in the woods close to where she was eventually found. Police responded, per the scanner, but, like the morning prior, came back with nothing.
Into Thursday, the black helicopters continued to fly overhead as the manhunt raged on. Coes Pond was shut down as the WPD focused heavily on boat stuff that ended up being unnecessary.
Friday, Aug. 21
On “Talk of the Commonwealth,” Eric Batista said the city council could vote to instruct him to put together a civilian review board ordinance and he would. He said so knowing with absolute certainty that the council which three days prior voted down putting up signs about ICE would absolutely not vote for him to do that. The buck-passing machine that is our form of government working as designed.
At a 3 p.m. press conference, police announced a warrant for Solomon’s arrest. Interestingly, the warrant was only for a single charge: assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. Well, two instances of the one charge, one with the quibbling difference of “with serious bodily injury” tacked to the end. The cable news would have you thinking there’s an armed and dangerous killer on the loose, but the powers that be saw fit to only charge her with the same charge they hit Ashley Spring with for the baby bottle full of water. At the press conference, they only let on that they believed the weapon was a “sharp object.”
At the press conference, Saucier said:
His service weapon was not missing his home. But again we still believe she may be armed and dangerous. We want to keep that out there.
The nature of the injury was a sharp object. So we don’t know
A reporter asks what probable cause they have to charge Karen Solomon. At this point DA Joe Early steps in with a brusque “no.”
Then he takes the floor.
“As the chief said no one’s going to stop until we find Karen Solomon and really that’s can’t add too much more. Just have to let them do their jobs.”
Again, the totality of available evidence, from the scanner reports and the drips of information afterward, point as much to suicide as to murder. Karen Solomon was never even charged with murder. The detail that is completely lost by this time is that Karen herself called the police. As of my writing this, the case has been declared a murder-suicide publicly by police while there remains no public details on probable cause or a murder weapon.
Over the weekend, the black helicopters stopped buzzing overhead, as Karen Solomon remained at-large the manhunt crawled along. No news on any front about much of anything.
Until Monday morning, when the black helicopters came roaring back, giving the manhunt for this supposedly dangerous woman a real 9-5 quality.
Monday, August 24
At 12:49 p.m., 10 minutes to go in the lunch break, the 9-5 manhunt was brought to a resolution by two employees of the Fairlawn Rehabilitation Center who happened upon a body in the nearby woods. The location is a kilometer and a half from the location officers were called to on Day 2, and about as far away from the Solomon home.
At about 4:15 p.m., a press conference was held outside the police station. Chief Saucier, with DA Joe Early to his left, Tommy Duffy to his right, and about a dozen suited men behind him, spoke for about five minutes. He said that two people at Fairlawn found the body. He said the identification was only preliminary, and still needed to be verified by the medical examiner.
“In addition to the surrounding area, we did locate a handgun in the area of the body.”
That could mean a few different things. Hold onto the thought, because then Saucier abruptly changes the subject.
And I also wanna come back to, when we put out that this was a domestic incident, that’s based on Mass General Law. Anytime there’s a family or household member, it constitutes a domestic as far as for crimes. At no time did the Solomon family have any history of domestic abuse. I wanna make myself absolutely clear at this point that has nothing to do with this case.
My ‘there was no domestic abuse’ t-shirt has many people asking questions already answered by my t-shirt.
Matter settled, he then transitions back to the immediate facts, making a firm declaration that, of course, all the outlets ran with.
We believe this case is a tragic murder suicide that occurred, and we still have plenty of work to do as far as wrapping up all the pieces to this. Again, it’s tragic.
It wasn’t until a reporter asked directly that Saucier said he believed that she shot herself. But he also said no gunshot was detected or reported, also after being asked. And that particular area is blanketed with Shotspotter microphones.
He said it wasn’t a service weapon but was likely another gun owned by the husband, though that he wasn’t sure yet.
As the line of questioning went on, Early and the men behind him grew noticeably uncomfortable, their eyes shifting around, their postures changing. The interview ended after a few more questions, all of them softballs.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, a full-honors funeral procession for Kurt Sullivan shut the downtown down.
Wednesday, August 26
At a funeral Wednesday at Our Lady of the Angels church, Kurt’s brother addressed the hundreds of police officers, public officials and others there for the ceremony, and some of his comments, as relayed by the Telegram, read a bit worrying.
Salomonsson urged mourners to ignore the negativity.
“We cannot allow the heinous, evil incarnation of this past week to define my brother’s life,” he said. “We cannot allow the sad, pathetic comments of the parasites on social media to write the narrative.
“We will write the narrative, all of us here.”
There was no clear mention of the officer’s wife, Karen Solomon, who police say killed Kurt Solomon on the morning of Aug. 18 before taking her own life.
Also, craft appreciator I am, just want to say Rick Sinclair took one hell of a pallbearer shot right here.
So that’s where we are.
As it stands we know very little about the death of Kurt and Karen Solomon, but we have nevertheless coalesced around the very cut and dry narrative of a fallen hero in the true blue Massachusetts cop tradition, taken by a wife who’d suddenly and inexplicably turned murderous and then suicidal.
It’s a narrative we’re primed to accept, and we see in this moment it being accepted despite an insufficient body of evidence. Left unchallenged our collective firmware leads us naturally to see the dead man as a hero and the dead woman as some flavor of insane. With only dribbles of concrete information to go off, we have done a great job of filling in the gaps. We still don’t know: the cause of death autopsy determinations for either person; whether the body recovered is even Karen’s; the “sharp object” used in the death of Kurt Solomon, or by whom it was used; what physical evidence there is to suggest Karen assaulted Kurt; how close “in the area” means vis-a-vis the gun; who owns said gun, or whether it was fired; any of the circumstances leading up to this tragedy. I have some stuff I haven’t shared yet—as I wrote up top, we gotta be sure we’re inserting rock solid stuff into this discourse—and will continue to chase down other leads, though most of them quickly pan out to be garbage, products of a rumor mill and media environment that makes Jose Rivera feel good about publicly sharing his experience with violating the NextDoor terms of service after disseminating false information.
While we’ll never know what happened last Tuesday morning, really, and it’s not our business anyway, the way the consent manufacturing machine works around here is very much our business. The moral of this story, as it stands, having been insufficiently padded with evidence but nevertheless asserted with confidence, is “idk, some women are crazy.” And I fear, now that the spectacle of this event is past us, the TV crews off to some other community with some exploitable tragedy, that’s where we’re all going to decide to leave it. And for that reason alone it’s incumbent on us to press for a thorough investigation and a public release of the findings. As Solomon’s brother showed us in real time yesterday, the narrative currently on offer can and will be used as a cudgel to cast critics of the department as the genuine “heinous” entity: the unseen coven engineering the tragic outcomes by shadowy means.
No odds and ends today this post is overlong as is and I owe you all an election guide over the next few days so I’ll put em there. If you’re voting early, just please don’t vote for Raj. And please consider supporting this outlet!
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Thank you for the timeline and statement of what little facts we have been given, as well as restrained and thoughtful commentary.
Trustworthy reporting, Bill. It feels creepy to comment on such tragedy and sadness, but here goes.
The comments of the officer's brother, as reported, likely reflect both anger and grief. It's very understandable. However, using the term "narrative" twice is concerning.
Narrative: a spoken or written account of connected events; a story.
The term "investigation" would have been more appropriate in both instances.