By Roslyn Ryan
Editor

Perhaps it is a sign that we are healing.

As two of the defendants in the Tahliek Taliaferro murder case go on trial today, the events of that awful day last June seem very far away. It feels, for lack of a better description, as though life has moved on.

There is an expected arc for events like these, I suppose, as predictable as if it were scripted into a film.

The story at first dominates every conversation and every headline.

The level of emotion is ratcheted up yet another notch as more details emerge and everyone scrambles to analyze and try to make sense of what has happened.

The topic stays in the news for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then gradually begins to fade away.

This is the perspective from behind an editor’s desk, of course. For the Taliaferro family, I can only imagine the pain of that day is no less searing today, the tragic images no less vivid, than they were last summer.

To try and figure out whether the county has been changed by the killing and the two unrelated murders that followed closely behind it, is somewhat pointless. As we do — as people do everywhere — we have moved forward.

Our thoughts on this day should instead be with those who will never be able to move on.

They are the ones for whom the court’s judgment— expected to be rendered by the end of this week—will hold the most meaning.

To say they will get closure is not our place. The only hope, truly, that remains, is that they get justice.