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A lurid horror came to Luzerne County, unfolding in our pages as law enforcement released the disturbing details of a corpse found in a Carlisle Street basement in Wilkes-Barre.
It began in February when, like a TV police procedural, officers discovered a body so badly decomposed that required multiple people — including students in anthropology at Mercyhurst University in Erie — to collect all the remains, identified as human.
In a TV show, brilliant forensic experts using amazing tools and techniques would identify the person, and police would track down and capture or kill the murderer, all in an hour or two. Real life, of course does not tie up lose ends so effortlessly. This case didn’t see any arrests until this week. As the investigation developed, the details kept getting grimmer.
Allegations of sexual child abuse emerged. Two people were charged with obstructing officers attempting to check on the welfare of child. An injured man claimed he had been held against his will in the basement. The body of the former owner of the house was found in a wooded area near Kidder Street, at the bottom of a steep embankment.
Six weeks after the body in the dirt basement had been found buried in a tarp and covered with moth balls and lime — presumably an attempt to prevent the odor of decay from drawing attention — five people were arrested for the kidnapping and brutal killing of a Michigan woman, Nicole Cuevas, 38. Details of what exactly happened will likely continue to become clearer as the case proceeds, but the descriptions already provided by Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce should shock everyone.
Cuevas was handcuffed in the basement and severely beaten over several weeks.
“The beatings resulted in bruising, a broken ankle, nearly all of her ribs were broken, her nasal cavity was destroyed, her head was shaved, she was stabbed and slashed in several places including her arm, torso and all over her back, and her hyoid bone in her neck was broken, that is generally indicative to investigators of strangulation,” Sanguedolce said. She was repeatedly stomped, kicked and strangled.
It is hard to conceive of such behavior against a fellow human. Indeed, it requires a very profound de-humanizing to relentlessly attack and torture a chained person. And while there will almost certainly be many important details revealed as this case evolves, nothing will change the fact that the perpetrators at some point deemed Cuevas as unfit to be treated like another human.
We risk becoming inhuman whenever we denigrate, demonize or trivialize the lives of others. It is one thing to oppose in a debate, to amass facts in effort to define a person’s actions, to curse in the heat of the moment, or to defend against a physical attack. It is another to repeatedly talk as though others aren’t even human. Yet we seem to have reached a point in public and political discourse where words and phrases that overtly dehumanize others are not only defended, but normalized.
Motives and other details in the torture and death of Cuevas remain unclear. And we know, of course, that words did not break her bones, cut her wounds or bury her remains. But words are where dehumanizing starts. And her fate is a reminder of where such thinking can end.
– Times Leader