News
The AP is reporting that the FBI is investigating the hanging death earlier this month of Bill Sparkman, 51, in rural Kentucky to determine if Sparkman, a census worker, was killed because he worked for the the U.S. government.
Sparkman’s body was found hanging in a tree in a cemetery in the Daniel Boone National Forest in southwest Kentucky on Sept. 12 with the word “FED” scrawled across his chest.
Sparkman, who also worked as a substitute teacher, was tasked by the Census Bureau with conducting door-to-door interviews in the area.
“Our job is to determine if there was foul play involved — and that’s part of the investigation — and if there was foul play involved, whether that is related to his employment as a Census worker,” FBI spokesman David Beyer said, according to the AP.
A spokeswoman for the Census Bureau’s regional headquarters in Charlotte said she was informed by the FBI that Sparkman’s death was being investigated as “an apparent homicide.”
Asked about the motive behind her son’s death, Henrie Sparkman told the AP: “I have my own ideas, but I can’t say them out loud. Not at this point… Right now, what I’m doing, I’m just waiting on the FBI to come to some conclusion.”
At this early stage, nothing can be ruled out including suicide and other more typical motives, but if it was murder, the mode of death is eerily reminiscent of lynchings during the Jim Crow era.
A report from local television offers insight into Sparkman’s character:
Concern… gripped the staff of Johnson Elementary last Thursday when Bill Sparkman didn’t show up for his after school work assignment.
“He was always where he was supposed to be, when he was supposed to be. He didn’t call..he didn’t show up,” said [school official] Gilbert Acciardo.
…Sparkman had recently beaten the odds in an often fatal form of cancer. That was while he spent two years earning a teaching degree while holding down two jobs. And school staff say he was always dependable. Then on Sunday his body was found more than 30 miles away in a rural part of Clay County.
“We have the same questions everybody else does — what happened to Mr. Sparkman? Because we know what police have told us,” said Acciardo.
On the website for Western Governors University, where Sparkman recently received his teaching degree, he offered a testimonial:
“To be here today at graduation at Western Governors University means so much; not only for the degree itself, but for everything that I learned towards the degree, for everything I’ve been going through for the last few years with the education and otherwise, it just means so much more for me to be here. I realized to be here today and to take part in the fulfillment of my goal, of a dream that has been building, it has just been super.”
The Census Bureau has suspended door-to-door canvasing in the area.
Topics: News
The human garbage that did this to this decent, hard-working man are the same refuse that elect idiotic pieces of crap like Mitch McConnell to the U.S. Senate. I am ashamed to live on the same planet, let alone in the same country, as the animals who killed this poor man.
That’s the way it has always worked from Nazi Germany to Rwanda. Some psychopathic radio host goads an even crazier fool to commit atrocity.
Somebody who worked two jobs so he could teach elementary kids. Yeah, that’s somebody who deserves to die in the “New Amerika.”
The first thing that comes to mind is Michelle Bachman nand her lunatic-fringe fear-mongering directed toward the US Census and, by extension, US Census workers. People have been saying that the irresponsible speech coming from the right-wing Beckophiles is going to get someone killed. Now it looks like it has and if this does turn out to be a homicide then Michelle Bachmann, Michael Steele, Neal Boortz and Meghan Clyne all have Mr. Sparkman’s blood on their hands.
Outstanding, Jon !