Left for Garbage

she claimed she deserved only the best from life.
    America , it seems, looking back on the history of this tragic family, that there may have been early signs of the seeds of destruction which ripened so terribly on a hot June morning in 2008.
    Keith did indeed go to work for his father in the successful family dealership , and Margaret gleefully informed family member that in a short space of time, as soon as Keith got up to speed at Brown Used Auto’s, his father would retire and Keith would run the dealership.
    It seemed , America, that Margaret’s dreams of a successful life were well within her grasp, but it was not to be. Within months Keith had begun arguing fiercely with his father over operations and the changes he wanted to make. Those arguments culminated one afternoon when Keith seized his aging father in anger and threw him through the plate glass window of the dealership.
    That’s right , America, Keith Brown, father of Fibber McMom, a young woman accused of murdering her own helpless baby girl, once assaulted and injured his own elderly parent.
    Following Keith’s attack on his father , he was fired and then quickly disinherited, shattering Margaret’s hopes, as Keith had shattered his father’s window.
    Keith , still hoping, I suppose, to gratify his avaricious wife, took out a first and a second mortgage on the home he owned with Margaret and opened Keith Brown Used Car Sales - opened and ran it in to the ground within a year. Margaret and Keith then fled Ohio, just in front of their long list of creditors, and headed for the sunny climate of Florida, where Margaret’s aged parents and three of her siblings had previously relocated. But the fresh start Margaret and Keith wanted seemed to elude them.
    Keith was unable to find work as a police officer , based on his assault on his father back in Ohio, and was reduced to working as a security guard for an hourly wage. Margaret fared better, becoming employed as a nurse for the prestigious Genesee Clinic, and eventually rising to the position of supervisor. But inside the small house on Subdivision Lane, tensions grew.
    Margaret resented Keith for his inability to either earn or maintain a living wage , and marital dynamics shifted as Margaret became the breadwinner. The children were not thriving during these years, either.
    Seeley , long pushed to the side by Margaret’s seemingly obsessive focus on Denise, appeared to friends and relatives as what they have described as a ‘lost soul’, and Denise, the beautiful daughter Margaret loved so much, wasn’t doing any better. She had dropped out of high school and started a low paying job working for Kodak at Universal Studios, snapping pictures of people wandering around the park, and then she became pregnant.
    In a family filled with tensions , Denise’s announcement of her pregnancy was not given until two weeks before she gave birth. Her brother Seeley was oddly excluded from the news of even the last minute pregnancy announcement, and to pile on the injury, he was told not to visit his sister and the baby at the hospital. Within a few days of Denise and the baby arriving home, Seeley was asked to leave the Brown home under a cloud, not yet explained.
    Meantime , in the house of Brown, time was running out for Baby Deeley; her young mother Denise wasn’t doing well. Denise had never bothered to return to her job at Kodak after giving birth, but to her family and friends she maintained that she was still working there. In fact she had been promoted. No longer just a camera girl now, she was an Events Coordinator for Universal Studios. While she lied to her parents about her imaginary job, she also lied about the imaginary nanny who cared for her child while she was at her nonexistent job. In reality she was killing time indulging in a string of high risk one-night stands, complete with a few additional pregnancy scares, as well as beginning a series of thefts from her parents’ bank and credit accounts.
    Other family members during these years used the phrase ‘spooky’ to describe Denise Brown, and related to the ‘Eye on America’ team a grim little story which foreshadows the summer of 2008.
    In 2001 the Brown family took off for Sanibel Island to attend an extended family celebration of the golden wedding anniversary of Margaret’s parents , Marvel and Richard. The entire clan gathered in a beach front condo and prepared to enjoy a full week of family togetherness.
    B ut it was not