WP Magazine: After Dad shot Mom, a family deals with the haunting legacy of gun violence

[Mira]

WP Magazine: After Dad shot Mom, a family deals with the haunting legacy of gun violence
Posted by Neely Tucker on February 28, 2013 at 11:51 am


The Vessels family on Easter Sunday, 1964, three years before Ken shot Fran. From left, the boys are Ken, Joseph and Kris; the girls are Mary, Judy and Lynnie. 
 Courtesy of Lynnie Vessels)
Edward Kenneth Vessels married his bride, Fran, in the stone- and-stained-glass embrace of St. Dominic’s Church in Southwest Washington in the summer of 1952. They were a handsome couple in their mid-20s, and in many ways were the embodiment of the postwar middle-class American dream.
Ken, the son of a railroad man, was a former Marine who became an insurance agent in his native Louisville. The family owned some 200 acres outside town. He had prospects.
Frannie, the only child of German and Lithuanian immigrants, was raised in the District and Northern Virginia. She was a registered nurse.
They met as students in a biology class at Catholic University and eventually settled in a little house on the outskirts of Louisville. They had three boys and three girls.
In 1960s family photographs, the eight of them — Dad in narrow tie, Mom in cat-eye glasses, the boys in buzz cuts, the girls in hats and summer dresses — appear as if lifted from a Norman Rockwell painting: The Family After Church.
Behind closed doors, they lived the American Nightmare.

Ken Vessels, a pleasant man at the office, was a raging alcoholic at home.
He beat their children, particularly the boys, with little provocation and less mercy. “Pops” was a man of modest physical proportions — about 5-foot-9 and 165 pounds — but, his children say, was possessed of a monstrous gift for cruelty.
He lined them up single file and lashed them with switches or a belt. He once knocked out Joseph, the youngest boy, with the butt of a gun. To this day, neighbors remember being kept awake after midnight by the boys’ plaintive cries when Ken forced them to sit on a wooded hill behind the house: “Sir, may I come in?”

There is a lot more to read and to ponder. Most of it is what happened to the children and the surviving mother - and also to the drunken brute of a gun toting husband and father.
here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/liveblog/wp/2013/02/28/magazine-after-dad-shot-mom-a-family-deals-with-the-haunting-legacy-of-gun-violence/#comments

[Helen Reddy]

1. Very, very sad.

"When Ken shot Fran, the boys ran from their father. The girls ran to their mother."

[raccoon]

2. Interesting, four of the six kids never had children. nt

[Jefferson23]

3. No one to rescue them from the dysfunctional bastard at the time..which is criminal in and

of itself. The blow back in their lives is not surprising, but certainly depressing as hell.

It kills me when I read of an individual's profile like this one:
Ken Vessels, a pleasant man at the office, was a raging alcoholic at home.

Self-contained rage.


K&R