Character is what you are, not what other people think you are.

The news this morning tells me that the marriage (second try) of the guy who dressed up as Santa and killed nine people at a party recently started to break apart after his (second) wife found out about the brain damaged son he’d abandoned…

Marriage splintered over man’s stunning revelation

He was a software engineer who liked SUVs and went to Mass on Sundays. She was a secretary with a quick mind and an infectious laugh. When Bruce Pardo married Sylvia Orza three years ago, the match seemed ideal — right down to the housing arrangements: He lived alone in a sparsely furnished house and she had three children and plenty of furniture.

But the marriage splintered nearly a year ago when she discovered that, years earlier, he had abandoned a brain-damaged son but continued to claim him as a tax write-off.

Sylvia Pardo was appalled, according to a source close to the police investigation…

I’d read about the son previously and how Pardo had continued to claim him as a tax write-off even though he’d basically abandoned him and wasn’t paying any child support.  The tale I got from the news outlets about the Christmas party massacre contained this horrible detail I hadn’t been able to get out of my mind:  Pardo’s first victim was an 8 year old girl who had come running up to him when she saw him in the Santa suit.  He shot her in the face.  I just couldn’t fathom that.  I’d read about the nasty divorce, and his loosing his job, but shooting the kid like that was more cold blooded then I could picture from all that by itself.  There had to be more then the divorce and the job I thought at the time. 

And there was more.  Well…less.  Less to him then anyone around him really grasped.  There were all the usual statements from friends about how Pardo’s behavior that night was a total shock and completely out of character and so on.  But it wasn’t.  He had an easy laugh and a calm, quiet disposition.  But character isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it.  That’s what’s missing from so many of these horrible news stories about the quiet man who suddenly goes on a berserk rampage.  People see the easy going smile and they don’t notice there is nothing behind it. 

If I had read these news stories about Pardo and seen a man who had abandoned a son, used him to cheat on his taxes, married another woman for her money and was living it up until he got caught, I’d still be confused as to how he could be so cold blooded.  But he wasn’t a crook.  He was a cheat.  It’s not the passionate man you need to be afraid of.  The angry one.  The wily one.  It’s the empty one.  Be afraid of the empty one.