We apologize if we aren’t inclined to accept without reservation the tidy explanation that has been offered up by the Nashville Chief of Police for the death of former Titans and Ravens quarterback Steve McNair.
There’s something about a woman with gunpowder residue on her left hand and a bullet hole in her right temple that makes us wonder what the hell is going on.
But even if, as it appears, Kazemi did it, we have questions that need to be answered.
Most importantly, why is the identity of the person who sold her a gun such a big secret? We now know she bought it in the parking lot of a Dave & Buster’s. (I’ve been to a Dave & Buster’s, and I didn’t notice the “Buy A Handgun Here” sign anywhere on the property.)
And we still want to know what role if any Keith Norfleet had either in the purchase of the gun or the thought process that resulted in the purchase of the gun.
Did Kazemi know on her own how to “score” a gun, or did she have to ask someone (like Norfleet) to hook her up? And if the person(s) she asked were the same person(s) to whom she had been expressing suicidal thoughts over the last week of her life, why didn’t they intervene?
Then there’s the reality that, as of a day ago, police were stumped as to a motive. So how did they determine in the past 24 hours that Kazemi had been talking about killing herself in the week before she took Steve McNair with her?
One of our biggest questions is how an apparent stream of cries for help became something far more sinister, resulting in both a murder and a suicide. If she was indeed the shooter, we think that something happening in connection with that DUI arrest set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the final action.
Bottom line? Though the Nashville Metro police apparently believe that this ugly ordeal can be neatly wrapped up and tied with a bow, we think that more than a few folks who were in the periphery of Kazemi and McNair’s lives knew or should have known that something very bad was about to happen.
And none of them did a thing.
Setting aside the question of whether anyone broke the law (and we don’t know whether anyone did), this case feels to us like a much more troubling example of a person being assaulted in the street -- and the folks in the nearby buildings pulling their blinds and turning up the volume on their televisions.
UPDATE: Aaron Wilson watched the press conference and re-watched it on his DVR. Here’s what the Chief of Police said about the gun transaction: “We believe that it was just her and the person that she purchased it from. She knew the gentleman she bought the gun from from a prior vehicle purchase or discussion of a prior vehicle purchase. Quite by serendipity, it turned out he said to her that he had a gun when she asked him if he knew of any way of getting a gun.”