Famous people die every day – not because they are at greater risk than anyone else, but just because nobody lives forever, and there are more famous people now than ever before.
It is therefore difficult, and dangerous, to try to read too much into celebrity deaths. In a world covered by television news and radio news for a century, not to mention 24/7 coverage on the internet for some thirty years now, we are bound to encounter every kind of news story many times per day.
The common line has it that “famous deaths come in threes,” as if it’s some kind of jinx or curse, but it’s not.
So we should be cautious about the risk of jumping to conclusions when we imagine patterns in such news stories, but sometimes these patterns are real, and we disregard them at our peril.
Look, for example, at this past week.
On December 6, Grammy-nominated musician Roderick “Rory” Macleod, age 70, Roomful of Blues bassist and Brown University music instructor, was killed in Rhode Island while walking his dogs. Minding his own business in broad daylight, he was struck and killed when Shannon Godbout, a drug-addled, speeding drug dealer left her lane, wildly veering all over the road, killing Macleod before crashing her SUV into power poles. When the police collected her, they found her with plenty of illegal controlled substances, likely in the midst of a distribution run. Her rap sheet is peppered with moving violations and worse, with over a hundred prior arrests on her record, but there she was, free to terrorize the public roads and kill an innocent man walking his dogs.
Then on the opposite coast, on Monday, December 8, the Grammy-nominated opera singer Jubilant Sykes, age 71, was stabbed to death at his home in Santa Monica, Ca, by his own son, 31-year-old Micah Sykes. The younger Sykes was assumed to be bipolar and schizophrenic, and to spend time on both prescription and non-prescription pharmaceuticals. His violent nature, resulting in at least one restraining order request over the years, has been known for over a decade.
And on Sunday, December 13, Academy Award winning director and actor Rob Reiner, age 78, was discovered to have been stabbed to death, along with his 68-year-old wife, by their own son, Nick Reiner, age 32, following a public argument the night before at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party. Nick Reiner had been a drug addict practically all his life, having started in grammar school and having done over a dozen stints in rehab before he was even out of his teens.
Is there a common thread?
All these victims were talented people in the arts – a musician, a singer, a director – people in the public eye every day. These are not shut-ins or hermits, far from the public eye; their calling, their livelihood, is in the world of performance. Whether at concert venues, theatres or movie sets, these three septuagenarians spent their lives surrounded by people, in careers that depend on the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly guaranteed by our Constitution, and the safety in crowds that, traditionally, only an honorable western society provides.
But all three were killed by violent destroyers who were free to do so because of a failure of the criminal justice system, a failure that has been written about in the press, debated in the halls of Congress, and covered in presidential campaigns for decades, but has still remained unaddressed.
The simple question is, how do we reduce the incidence of drug abuse and mental illness driven violence?
The Left talks about it all the time; they tell us to “care” about people with mental illness, to show compassion, to give them second chances, third chances, twentieth chances, hundredth chances. They tell us to “care” about people with drug issues, to give them free needles to protect them from AIDS or multiple chances to try to beat the addictions, to encourage them to visit rehab centers again and again, in hope that one time, sometimes, it will actually take.
And they shut their eyes to the stores robbed, the girls raped, the elderly mugged, and the strangers beaten, by these unrepentant addicts, bums and criminals.
The Right has at least a partial answer: Remove the drug gangs from our communities, get the drugs out of our schools, put the dealers in jail or even deport them if we can. And when the mentally ill commit crimes that prove that they cannot be trusted to be out free in public with the rest of us, lock them up for those crimes, don’t let them use their mental illness or addiction as a “get out of jail free” card.
Neither approach is perfect, but note the main difference:
The Left’s approach shows their compassion for the violent drug dealers, vagrants, users and violent psychotics; the Right’s approach shows compassion for their innocent victims.
Shouldn’t public policy be designed with concern for the victim first, ahead of the perpetrator?
Our society has changed, and not for the better. Half a century ago, we would have locked up the drug dealers and the violent lunatics at the first opportunity, and thrown away the key. Sometimes that response was too severe, and people served longer sentences than they deserved. Sometimes the mentally ill were confined for too long, or unfairly; sometimes family members committed each other unjustly. The system merited a modest, cautious change.
But in the 1970s and 80s, when that pendulum swung the other way, it swung too far. Afraid of committing the innocent, we let the dangerous walk around free to terrorize their communities, after countless incidents. Afraid of over-sentencing the addicts or low-level dealers, we stopped punishing most drug crimes at all, leaving our communities full of drug abusers who could have been removed.
The three deaths in our stories this week are noteworthy only because they were famous artists – a musician, a singer, a filmmaker. But their stories are sadly not unique at all in 21st century America. They are the stories of thousands of deaths every year, in every state, in every demographic.
Our society has made choices – to allow drug dealers into the country over a porous border, to allow drug dealers to go free after dozens of arrests, to allow people who’ve been identified as violent, as criminally insane even, to remain free to terrorize their communities, their neighbors, even their own families.
Now, where Rob Reiner is concerned, well, we all know that Rob Reiner voted for that. Even as his own son scared him often enough that he told his friends he feared what might happen someday, he continued to champion the Democrat party line of opposing incarceration of the dangerous, of always choosing the criminals, the addicts, the mentally ill over the law-abiding citizens who are sure to be their victims someday, sooner or later.
We know that Reiner gave his son, Nick, multiple chances to reform; so too did Jubilant Sykes support his son, Micah, again and again, as he drifted through addiction and mental illness, scaring the neighbors, once even terrorizing parishioners at their church.
What can the police do, if nobody prosecutes? What can the criminal justice system do to protect us, if we tie their hands and don’t allow commitment to insane asylums against the lunatic’s will?
We don’t want to lock up the innocent; we have all heard enough stories of the “sane but inconvenient” being declared insane and locked up, for convenience’ sake, in years past.
But there are people who need to be locked up, for the good of society in general. Our government fails its constituents when it wrings its hands and says “despite ten years of warnings, there was nothing we could do.”
Well, if there are ten years of warnings – and there were, with all three of these cases and with thousands of others – then the government needs to find a way to do something.
Because when government knows that someone is a violent lunatic or a violent drug abuser, and fails to remove him from society, then government shares some of the responsibility when that attacker kills his neighbor, his parent, or a stranger.
Somewhere along the line, Micah Sykes, Nick Reiner, and Shannon Godbout should have been locked up for life, either in jail or in a mental hospital, before they killed their innocent victims.
The Democratic Party is never going to step up to address this issue; the Democratic Party threw in their lot with the criminal element decades ago, and that choice will never be undone.
So it will fall to the Republicans, like all the rest of America’s problems. Somehow, the GOP must find a way to thread this needle and protect the innocent from the guilty, the sane from the psychopaths.
We can never solve every problem or prevent every crime, but we can certainly prevent the ones that come with years and years of warnings.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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