In light of today’s tragedy in Newtown, CT, TNB is re-running this essay, originally published on August 28, 2012.  Thoughts and prayers go out to the victims, their families, and survivors. —Editors

Early in the morning on June 25^th, about a week before I arrived in my new hometown in western Pennsylvania, police here opened fire on a car of three black man speeding towards them, killing the driver, 27-year-old Elip Cheatham.

According to eyewitness accounts, the events of the night are as follows: A shooting occurred at Edder’s Den, a bar in what most of us would euphemistically call a “rough” neighborhood. One of the victims was a friend of Cheatham’s. Cheatham and another friend loaded the 20-year-old with a leg wound into the back of Cheatham’s car and drove towards the hospital. Blocks away, they encountered a police blockade, and this is where accounts begin to splinter.

The troubled boy attends school, drops out, stocks up on guns and paramilitary gear, stages his siege–from a bell tower, in a cafeteria, down a lane of classrooms, in a parking lot or a theater. Secret diaries are found, blog rants or videos discovered. We just can’t believe it. Then we believe it. We shudder and weep and damn things. We forget that we’ve already forgotten.

Places that know their variation of the story, that have suffered human wreckage and been left behind, must ache from the next round of oblivious headlines that repackage each event as if it’s a new sensation, Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen Before.