Age: 17
Country: Japan, moving to Mexico in a week.
Ministries: Childcare, Cooking, Performing/Shows

This is addressed mainly to those of you who feel as if it is your job to completely destroy and disrupt my way of life in any way you possibly can. This is to those of you who are telling me that I am living in a community that “abuses their children mentally, emotionally, and physically,” to those who are insisting that my way of life is a hazard to this society, to those who are telling me that my life is being “controlled” by others, to those who are blaring out not only to me, but to thousands of others, that Angela deserved to be murdered.

I cannot think for the life of me why anyone, for any reason, would say, or even think such a thing! Not only is murdering someone scripturally wrong and against my personal beliefs, it is also morally wrong and, not to mention, against the law. To those of you who have sunk so low as to think that murdering someone is a good thing, I suggest that you take one long look at your way of thinking. You are rendering human life as nothing; you are saying that a human being is no better than a “painful splinter.”

To hear you blame the Family for such a thing as murder, is also extremely shocking to me, almost more shocking to me than hearing the original news in the first place! How can anyone even think that? There have never been any murders within the Family in the first place! Why don’t you look at the world around you and tell me how many murders you see occurring every year, perhaps then you’ll consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, the Family was not the cause of Angela’s murder. Oh yes, I know, “she was ‘abusing’ Pete, she drove him to it, he was forced to, she deserved it.” SHE DESERVED IT???

To those of you who are spreading outright lies about child abuse, about Pete’s [Ricky’s] upbringing in the Family, about the leaders of our group, and about how The Family’s children and young people are “secluded from the real world”, and “not able to socialize with ‘normal’ kids”, you tell me why I should listen to a thing you are saying. You tell me how I am supposed to believe anything you say about my way of life, when you continue to insist that an innocent woman deserved to die.

I don’t know exactly what happened when Angela was murdered, I don’t know all the circumstances and background that led up to it happening, neither did I know either Pete or Angela personally, but I do know about myself, I know about my life in the Family. I do know that we are not abused; to the contrary, we are given so much more input and training than any other young person out of our group could ever hope to receive! I do know that The Family was not to blame for Angela’s death. I know that Angela was innocent; I know that murdering someone is wrong. I may be ignorant of the details and I may be slightly innocent in my thinking, but in my mind, Angela did not deserve to die.

Maybe your way of thinking is a result of too much “open mindedness”, or maybe it’s because after being out of The Family, your “eyes have been opened” and you can truly see how the Family runs things, I don’t know. But for whatever reason you can think that the Family was to blame for Angela’s death, and that she even deserved to die, I have to ask you to please look at your frame of mind. How can the murder of any innocent being be right? How can it all be okay and fine with you? How can you just blow it off as a justifiable act? How can you say that Angela deserved to die?

The point that I am trying to get across here being that, according to my “brainwashed” mind, it is never okay to murder an innocent person. I am not mad at Pete, but neither am I sympathizing with him or justifying his actions. What he did was as a result of the little choices he had made during his life. He is now in a better place where he will have to take account for his actions. Why don’t those of you who are justifying Pete’s actions, start looking at your life, start looking at where it’s headed. If your heart is so calloused to people’s deaths, if you keep trying to convince yourself that Angela deserved to be killed, you might just wind up doing the same thing that Pete did.

Mary Jones is a second generation member of the Family International.