In the wake of the recent mass shooting in Maine, I sought out the breaking news. The reports were riddled with numbers while the varied news sources did their best to show the magnitude of what had just happened. 

Late on Wednesday, October 25th, the night of the shooting, preliminary reports came through.

They said, Breaking News: 16 killed in mass shooting in Maine. We’ve heard reports of as many as 22, but that is yet to be confirmed. As many as 60 injured, also unconfirmed. 

The conflicting reports rattled my brain. I wanted to know, Well, how many is it?

What is it with numbers? And why the hell are they so important to us?

Because, numbers make things exist. Numbers on houses. Pounds on the scale. Minutes on the clock. Days on the calendar. Years in our lives. Without them, we would literally have nothing, be nothing at all.

I mentioned in a previous blog post that I have an app on my phone that keeps track of the number of years, months, weeks and days (now 1,603) since my son Josiah was murdered in a carjacking, part of a mass killing in Central Washington in June 2019. I find seeing the numbers helpful, even if somewhat sickening, because they confirm what my brain already knows to be true.  

And why do we all sit on the edge of our seats waiting for the final death count? Because numbers matter. Numbers count things, but they also make things count. They help us to make order out of our thoughts, to comprehend what we otherwise could not.

The final death toll in Wednesday’s mass killing in Lewiston, Maine, is a staggering 18 people killed, 13 injured.

It was the 36th mass killing in the United States this year.

Thursday night, I read an article on the Associate Press’s website which mentioned a database maintained by the Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. The article states, “The database includes every mass killing since 2006 from all weapons in which four or more people, excluding the offender, were killed within a 24-hour time frame.”

Interesting, I thought. I wonder if Josiah is on there. I decided to follow the link to the database to find out.

The number killed by James and Donovan Cloud, at least indicated by the trial for the murders at White Swan and the plea bargain offered which included immunity for my son and the driver of the vehicle’s murders, came to a total of seven, but I had a sneaky feeling that’s not what it would say.

What did I find? Five. Five killed in White Swan on June 8, 2019. 

Often in my writing, I refer to Josiah’s death as when his life was scrubbed clean from the Earth. The reason why I describe it this way is because had I not been speaking up all of this time, Josiah would have disappeared into the ethers of red tape. 

One of my greatest fears was that I didn’t want what happened to my son to be just a statistic, but according to the database, he isn’t even that. If the database were correct, the mass murder that included the death of my son, Josiah Hilderbrand, and the driver of the vehicle, Jon Cleary, along with the five more murdered on Medicine Valley Rd. in White Swan would constitute the largest killing in Washington State since the data started being collected in 2006.

You won’t read this anywhere else because after the FBI took over my son’s case, they never spoke publicly about it and despite many interviews I have given to newspaper reporters, they have not printed much of what I’ve said because the FBI would not corroborate it.

I was consistently told that charges were coming, but instead they moved forward with the trial for the five killed at White Swan while telling me that charges for Josiah’s murder would come later. However, shortly before the trial began, a plea agreement was offered that included immunity for Josiah’s murder in exchange for a guilty plea for crimes committed in White Swan. These actions (and inactions) are what have kept the details of Josiah’s murder under wraps. His life was reduced to a bargaining chip played by two nervous prosecutors. The plea agreement didn’t even use his full name, only his initials.

Why does it matter? Because Josiah was not only a number, he was one of us. One of the 7 billion plus people on Earth. He mattered and deserves to be counted as such. 

I am often more disturbed by what representatives of the justice system have done than what happened on that dark summer night. You might wonder why…

What I have found through my own grief journey and the grief clients I work with is that the most difficult hurdles are the ones that our minds can’t make sense of. 

Recently, when I spoke to the agent who worked Josiah’s case, I told him this very fact, Troy, what the Clouds did forever changed my life, however my mind doesn’t struggle anymore to make sense of it. Why? Because, bad people do bad things. We all know this to be true. But when the good guys do bad things, that’s something altogether different.

A bit of a spoiler for those of you following my blog:
Currently, in Remember the Birds, I am writing Chapter 28. Having just finished 26 and 27, I can tell you those chapters cover the period of time when I travelled to Washington to view Josiah’s remains before they were sent off to the FBI’s forensics lab in Quantico, VA. During that visit, I met with federal prosecutors who treated me so horribly that I was compelled to write them a letter once I returned home setting boundaries for how I expected to be treated in the future. A couple of weeks later, the lead federal prosecutor sent word through the agent handling Josiah’s case, This is our answer to you. You will not be hearing from me again. And outside of calling to see if he could get me to agree to the stipulations in the plea agreement, he has kept his word. We never spoke again.

Then, last year, my Victims Rights were violated when the prosecutors office told me that I would not be allowed to read my Victims Impact Statement to James and Donovan Cloud at the sentencing hearing for the crimes committed at White Swan.

It has now been near six months since I filed a complaint with the Victims Rights Ombuds in Washington, DC.

“It is the responsibility of the Victims’ Rights Ombuds to receive and investigate complaints against Department of Justice employees who violate or fail to provide one or more of the following rights established under the CVRA.”

The complaint has been sent to the Federal Prosecutors Office in Yakima, but they still have not responded to it. And from what I have been told, there is no time requirement for a response, so yet again, I am on the other end of a bureaucratic silent treatment, subject to the whims and discretion of the system.

I’ve kept most of this stuff quiet, but quite frankly, I’m tired of it. Other complaints have been filed, one of which is sitting on a desk at the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. 

What does all of this mean moving forward?

I’m going to keep advocating, holding those accountable who should be accountable and calling out the bastards who would prefer I stay quiet. They have effectively erased Josiah from their roster and thrown his number in the trash.

However, they’ve underestimated me. I’m resilient, persistent, and not one to keep quiet. I believe that the squeaky wheel does eventually get the grease!

With all of you by my side, I am convinced that answers will come and that people will either do their jobs—or have to answer as to why they are being done so unscrupulously.

When I started writing this book it was to tell our story, but now it is about so much more. What the legal system has done to Josiah is philosophically no different than what the men did who killed him—they used him and then made him disappear. It’s deplorable.

I’m going to keep going!

Thank you for following along! Not only do you count, but your numbers do too. They will help me secure traditional publishing sometime in the not too distant future. If you have friends who might be interested in following this story, please share my blog with them along with my social media accounts.

Here are a few links worth reading if you haven’t already:
Victims Impact Statement
He Mattered – a piece that covers the sentencing for White Swan along with the plea agreement
Social Media accounts to follow/share:
Facebook
Instagram
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Thanks so much, as always, for reading!
Much love to you and yours,
Liz, Josiah’s mom, Writer and Advocate