The Murder-Suicide of Sahel Kazemi and former NFL Quarterback Steve McNair

A former NFL football star known for giving back to the community is happily married with four children. He is found dead in his condominium with a 20-year-old Dave & Busters waitress he had been secretly seeing for the last six months, who was also found dead next to him. The man died of multiple gun shots, while the woman died of one gunshot to the head. Police reports have concluded that the woman killed her lover before turning the gun to herself.

As anyone with internet knows, the former NFL football player is Steve McNair, married to Michelle McNair with four children, and the waitress in question is Sahel Kahezi, an Iranian immigrant who reportedly felt that her relationship with Steve McNair was unraveling before the murder-suicide took place. Word has it that she was also facing difficult financial problems as well: two car payments and doubling rental rates.

What exactly happened here? Sahel Kahezi must have been an extremely emotionally troubled individual if she was capable of murdering someone and then committing suicide. What else was going on in her life--internally and externally--for her to believe that if Steve McNair was even thinking of leaving her, then there was no point for her to live? Did she really have no one else to turn to in terms of family and friends? No one will ever know.

And then there is Steve McNair--the former NFL football star whose riches and fame lead him to wrong decisions that cost him his life. Was he so bored with his accomplishments that engaging in a secret affair with a younger mistress was the only way to bring more excitement to his life? What was it that he needed to escape from in order to initiate this secret affair? Again, no one will ever know.

And finally, we have left the true victims of this tragic affair: Michelle McNair, her four children and the rest of the members of the family who will have to carry the burden of his violent death for the rest of their lives. The countless and nameless family members, friends and loved ones of Sahel Kazemi who will always have unanswered questions for the rest of their lives for why she did this.

Here is an age-old principle worth repeating again and again: acts of violence, physically or verbally, even against a single person, reverberate from the source to affect other family members, other friends, other communities. They reverberate in the number of people affected, and also in the number of years the residue of the violent actions live on in people's hearts and minds.

Are we decreasing the reverberations of violence in the world? Are we increasing our own reverberations of peace ? These are the questions worth asking over and over the next time we read news stories about such senseless acts of violence.