What a miserable world this has become, Mr. H. We’re rearing an entire generation that doesn’t care about the suffering of the innocent.

He agreed with her wholeheartedly.

They decided to punish Randy next Tuesday—what would have been Kylie’s third birthday.

* * *

In the age of instant communication, tragedy is often unwittingly compounded by the sheer amount of venues through which it can be recounted; a perverse, modern-day variation of Telephone.

There might have been someone to blame for what happened next, or there might have been no one at all.

One could have blamed the sheriff’s deputy who was first on the scene, and the first person to see up-close the charred, still-twitching remains of Kylie Ann’s body; who among us could look on such a sight and not suffer some form of revulsion, heartbreak, or shock?

Easier still, place the blame on those at the television station whose job it was to monitor all police and sheriff’s calls; upon hearing the shocked and tearful voice of the deputy as he radioed in, who wouldn’t get so caught up in the excitement that maybe a syllable or two of his report wouldn’t get lost in the radio static?

Or point fingers at those who entered the information into the television station’s system so that it came up on the teleprompter almost as quickly as the deputy spoke.

Lay blame, if you like, on the anchor himself, who on this particular night chose to wear his new contact lenses instead of his glasses (which he thought made him look older than he cared to appear).

Take your pick: A shocked and weeping deputy who maybe slurred a word or two as he radioed in his report; communication monitors who perhaps didn’t hear everything quite right through the static and so unconsciously filled in the gaps created by a muffled syllable; excitement on the part of those who entered the information into the station’s computer because their broadcast had to be the first to break the story; an anxious, middle-aged anchorman who was worried about losing his position to a younger man and so tried to take ten years off his appearance by wearing new contact lenses and who, as a result maybe, just perhaps, misread something in the blurry, scrolling text.

Add these elements to an already horrifying tragedy and loose them into the self-perpetuating machinations of the Information Age.

Where all can be undone by a single numeral.

Lucy Thompson was not watching television seventeen minutes later when the anchorman, displaying the proper amount of concern, professionalism, and Gosh-We’re-Just-Human humility, looked into the camera and said, “We need to correct something we told you about earlier in the broadcast concerning the death of two-year-old Kylie Ann Patterson. Her brother, Randy, whose age our sources initially reported as being sixteen, is actually six years old. We have information coming in now that the girl’s death was an accident and not a homicide. For the full story, tune in tonight at ten.”