A4
THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2012
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
A very busy time of year About 200,000 packages a day are going through the Kansas City FedEx Ground Hub at 12501 N.E. 40th St. On Tuesday, package handlers J.D. Mansfield (left) and Carlos Campos positioned incoming packages for bar code scanning. FRED BLOCHER | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
COURAGE BEYOND WORDS
A COLORFUL WALK IN A FESTIVE FOREST
HOMICIDE | Victim recalled
MOURNING ‘A LEGEND’ WITH DOGS
DAVE HELLING
CO M M E N TA RY
M
illions of words have already been written about the Sandy Hook massacre, and millions more are coming. We’ll argue about gun control, violent video games, poor mental health services, inadequate school security. Words are tools — tools that make us human. Like tools, words can build up or tear down. They can inspire, anger, move. If misused, they can cause injury. Properly used, they can illuminate. Sometimes words aren’t up to the job, like grinding a granite boulder with a toothbrush. The schoolhouse murders seem to fit that description: It’s difficult to talk or write about the shootings without slipping into banality, because we just don’t have words that fully encompass such horror. Swords, it turns out, are mightier than pens. That’s OK. The shootings should stick in our memory like granite — rough, immovable, unchanged by time. Still, the Sandy Hook tragedy can help us understand words that can mean different things in different contexts. Take the word “courage.” Americans rightly honor the courage of soldiers, police, firefighters and other first responders. Yet theirs is clearly a front-end bravery — the people who run into buildings or look around dangerous corners sign up for those tasks, well aware that their safety could be at risk. They’re trained and equipped for the job. Vicki Soto, 27, wanted a different path. She and her Sandy Hook colleagues wanted to teach their eager young pupils important skills such as spelling, counting and that life has room for drawing holiday turkeys by outlining your hand. It’s likely she never considered the chance that she would be asked to put her body between her first-graders and rounds from an assault rifle. When the time came, though, she did just that. “Courage” fails to fully describe her sacrifice. Maybe “love” is a better word. If we look, we can find other examples of that kind of love. On Flight 93. In an Arizona parking lot. At a Colorado movie theater or high school. In every case, the best among us have always stepped — without hesitation — between killer and victim, terror and disaster, life and death. Contrast that with our elected leaders who, confronted with our nation’s deepest problems, seem more afraid of losing their jobs than fixing their country. It is, literally, a shame. In the coming weeks we’ll hear many words honoring the memories of the Sandy Hook victims. Taking needed steps to prevent another bloodbath — smarter gun rules, more mental health counseling, safer school buildings, all of it — might redeem some of those words, leaving the victims’ families, and all of us, with more than mere remembrance.
Local
Global renown came to expert on Afghan hounds who resided in Kansas City, Kan. By TONY RIZZO The Kansas City Star
Peter Belmont Jr. excelled as a breeder, judge and handler of championship dogs. And now news that Belmont was the victim of a homicide in Kansas City, Kan., is reverberating through the close-knit dog show community across the country and around the world. Belmont’s body was discovered Sunday afternoon, but Kansas City, Kan., police have not released details about how the 69-year-old retired educator was killed. For decades, Belmont was best known on the dog show circuit for his devotion to the breeding of Afghan hounds under the kennel name of Elmo. His renown was international. Patricia Egan, president of the Af- Belmont ghan Hound Club of New South Wales in Australia, wrote in an email Tuesday that she had worked closely with Belmont in his work as a show judge. “As well as being a legend in the Afghan hound world as a breeder of beautiful hounds under his ‘Elmo’ prefix, he was personally charming, friendly and helpful, and endlessly knowledgeable about the breed,” Egan SEE DOGS | A6
Trees decorated by churches, businesses and nonprofits are on display through New Year’s Day in the Hall of Waters Cultural Museum in downtown Excelsior Springs. On Tuesday, Barbara Nugent (left) of Kansas City, North, toured the Hall of Trees with her daughter, Amy Arasmith (background), and granddaughter, 7-year-old Ema Arasmith, both of Harrisburg, Pa. ALLISON LONG | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Boy taken Kindergartner loves BackSnack ravioli off life support By LAURA BAUER The Kansas City Star
Organs of child wounded in shooting in 2400 block of Denver Avenue will be donated. By CHRISTINE VENDEL The Kansas City Star
A 4-year-old boy shot in the head Saturday night — apparently the innocent victim of an ongoing gang dispute — has been removed from life support, Kansas City police said Tuesday. His family is allowing his organs to be donated, police said. Saturday’s shooting in the 2400 block of Denver Avenue marked the second time the boy had been involved in a shooting in Kansas City. He was inside a house in the 2400 block of Oakley Avenue last year when a gunman fired four shotgun blasts at it in the middle of the night, breaking the front window and damaging a car. No one was hurt, according to the police report. Aydan Perea was with his father and two other men in a vehicle parked in a driveway Saturday when a 1984 tan-overwhite Chevrolet Monte Carlo stopped in the street behind the parked vehicle. An occupant of the Monte Carlo fired at the vehicle, hitting the driver SEE CHILD | A5
The Northland kindergartner wants to be Superman when he grows up. And he has it all planned. “I would go to outer space,” says the 5-year-old, his hands jetting into the air, “and I would save the world.” For now, it’s him and his mom, and times can be financially tough. To help with that, every Friday he’s one of 40 kids at Graden Elementary School in Parkville who takes home a BackSnack from Harvesters. That’s possible because of a partnership formed a few years ago. In the beginning, Harvesters told the Northland Childhood Hunger Initiative it could provide 1,000 packs in Platte and Clay counties each week during the school year. The initiative would have to come up with the funding for any additional packs. Through a strong community fund-
think they think it’s homeless people. They don’t realize The Star is partnering with Harit’s a chronic probvesters in a virtual food drive lem. It could be a toward Harvesters’ BackSnack family of five, with program. Go to three kids at home feedingkckids.harvesters.org to make a donation. Kids in the and they live near program drew self-portraits, you.” including this kindergartner. As for the kin(Ravioli is falling off his spoon.) dergartner at Graden Elementary, he SUBMITTED ARTWORK always tries to help his mom put the raising effort, initiative members have food away each Friday — “get it to raised enough to pay for 1,800 Back- where it’s supposed to go.” And when ravioli or spaghetti are inSnacks. So, roughly 2,800 kids in the Northland receive a pack each Friday. side, he’s pretty happy. Those are his faThe initiative also more than doubled vorites. The boy also likes to help his mom the number of schools the food goes to, warm the ravioli and open the fruit. from 26 in the beginning to 59 now. “I share my BackSnack with my “I know people realize there’s hunger and they’re aware of Harvesters and mom,” he says. “My mom eats it with what they do,” said Chris Evans. “But I me on my family’s couch.”
HOW YOU CAN HELP
SHORT TAKE
Newsweek sees some Sly innovation in KC Newsweek, putting out a year-end list as magazines are wont to do, included Kansas City Mayor Sly James on its list of the “most innovative mayors in the U.S.” for what it called his “vision of building (a) ‘Silicon Prairie.’ ” The periodical credited James for lobbying Google to bring its ultra-fast fiber optic Internet service to town. “As a result,” Newsweek said, “new businesses and entrepreneurs are already starting to come to this
Midwestern tech mecca.” The magazine said that “James helped create the environment for this investment by embracing local tech startups,” gave him props for moving City Hall’s computing to the Internet “cloud” and for the development of the coming downtown streetcar project. Newsweek may be a tad bold in crediting James for landing Google Fiber. After all, Google chose Mayor Joe Reardon’s Kansas City, Kan., first for the project. And
although a few neighborhoods in Wyandotte County have Google Fiber service, it hasn’t yet reached Kansas City, Mo. And Google’s decision to pick Kansas City for the project has at least as much to do with its railroad crossroads past — and the way the track right of ways have been used to lay high-capacity Internet lines — as any tech-focused present. The company was also seduced by utility poles — property of local utilities, and not the purview of the mayor. | The Star
Mayor Sly James FILE PHOTO BY MIKE RANSDELL | THE STAR
FOR PHOTO ALBUMS OF EVENTS ACROSS KANSAS CITY, SEE COMMUNITY FACES AT WWW.KANSASCITY.COM