in regards to the murder of Rachel Hoffman

  A girl I went to high school with gets murdered a few nights before mother's day. I hear about it on a Facebook thread, I start reading the news articles online, watching clips of video. The whole situation infuriates me. She was twenty-three years old, a recent FSU graduate and this is a classic story of not only the system- but the whole war on drugs failing. The story goes something like this. At some point, she gets in trouble with drugs- marijuana, selling some small amount of pot, or possession some thing like that. And they work out a plea bargain with her: jail time or becoming an informant. So a scenario is set up and with the help of the Tallahassee Police Department a twenty-three year old girl, with no training in this matter is to arrange to meet two men. Not only is she sent to buy 1,500 pills of ecstacy and crack but she is also sent to buy a hand gun. Instructions are given, protocols are apparently taken and the plan is set in motion. She'll meet them in a park, she's not supposed to leave the park. And then, something goes wrong. Maybe the fact that she did not have experience buying crack and guns played a role, maybe it was a nervousness in her body that set the men off, maybe an informant system where people who get in trouble for pot are sent out to buy weapons is just a little off- but something goes wrong. The police lose contact with her. They can't find her, or her car. They say that she did something wrong- that she left when she was told to stay. In their defense, the police say that she did not follow instructions, that her mistakes led to her own death. A missing persons report is put out Wednesday night, her car shows up Thursday morning, the two man she was supposed to buy the narcotics from our arrested in Orlando, and her body is found sometime afterward. They call her parents early in the morning to tell them. And I wonder how they phrase it on the phone- "Your daughter that you raised, that you held as a child, your daughter that graduated from Countryside High School in 2003 and Florida State University in 2007, your daughter that you loved very much is gone." Or do they just say "I am sorry," while writing their defense statements? Do they say anything at all besides how she did not follow procedures. And I wonder what that would be like, meeting men in a park, and asking them for pills, for crack, a hand gun- what kind of voice should you use? What kind of face do you make? What if your cell phone rings you? What if they drag you away? What if they tell you to get into the car? What if you think about your mother's face and mother's day, and how your mother would feel- what if that goes through your head and it is obvious to the men across from you that something is wrong- what is the procedure for that? What is the Tallahassee Police Departments plan then? And you cannot tell me that this is not the system failing us, you cannot tell me that something is not very, very wrong about this situation. http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/18830539.html