I learned this morning that the death of William E. Sparkman, Jr. was a suicide, to my great surprise.
A Census Bureau worker in Kentucky who was found dead in September with “FED” written on his chest killed himself and staged his death to look like a homicide, state and federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
William E. Sparkman Jr. was found with his hands, feet and mouth loosely bound with duct tape, a rope loosely tied around his neck. Passersby spotted his body Sept. 12 in a remote area of the Daniel Boone National Forest in eastern Kentucky.
The condition in which Sparkman’s body was found led to speculation about whether he was a victim of anti-government violence. Area residents, however, surmised he had stumbled upon a backwoods drug lab.
But investigators concluded that Sparkman wrote the word on his own chest from the bottom up. He died of asphyxiation, an autopsy showed.
Witnesses told investigators that Sparkman had discussed ending his life. He had also discussed recent federal investigations of Kentucky public officials and the negative perceptions of federal agencies expressed by some residents of Clay County, Ky., where he lived, investigators said. Before his death, Sparkman also secured two life insurance policies, totaling $600,000, that would not pay out for suicide.
Sparkman was a substitute teacher and one of 5,900 part-time Census Bureau fieldworkers who conduct the annual American Community Survey and dozens of other government surveys each year. Normal census operations will resume in Clay County next month, Census Bureau spokesman Stephen Buckner said.
“The death of our co-worker, William Sparkman, was a tragedy and remains a loss for the Census Bureau family,” Buckner said in a statement. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.”…
Inserted from <Washington Post>
On September 26, I incorrectly concluded that his death was a murder, brought on by GOP hate speech. This is an excerpt of what I said:
…Michelle Bachmann and Glen Beck, you have done it. You have stirred peoples fears until some poor ignorant fool acted on your foul lies and deranged Census Bureau conspiracy theories, and now a man is dead for nothing more than doing his job…
Inserted from <Politics Plus>
I was wrong. And when I’m wrong, I say so. You didn’t find it buried under a bunch of other posts. It’s right on top, the day’s lead article. I assumed facts that seemed undeniably apparent at the time, but were not true, and therefore I apologize to my readers. You depend on me for accurate analysis, and I let you down. I promise to take more care in the future.
To Michelle Bachmann and Glen Beck, I offer no such apology. Everything I said about the likelihood of their hate speech to stir violence still stands. This time, I was wrong, but if they and their fellow goose steppers continue in this vein, I’ll be reporting an authentic victim of their rabble rousing far too soon to suit me.
