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The Weight That Stays: Survivors, Families, and the Aftermath of the .44
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Son of Sam spree left six dead and seven wounded — but the damage didn't stop when the handcuffs closed. This episode follows the survivors, the bereaved families, and the city's women who lived inside the fear for thirteen months.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people know David Berkowitz as the man who was caught. The arrest, the smirk, the parking ticket.
The Son of Sam spree ran for thirteen months. Six people killed.
Carl Denaro was shot in October of nineteen seventy-six, hit in the head while sitting in a parked car in Queens. He survived, but required a metal plate in his skull.
There's another layer to this, beyond the physical. And it applies not just to direct victims but to the broader population of young women who were living in New York City during that thirteen-month period.
The victims who died were Donna Lauria, Christine Freund, Virginia Voskerichian, Alexander Esau, Valentina Suriani, and Stacy Moskowitz. Behind each name is a family that had to absorb an irreversible loss and then continue existing in a world where that loss was also public, discussed, documented, and eventually turned into entertainment.
What's striking about many of the Son of Sam survivors is that they've continued to engage with the public record of what happened to them, often because the public record keeps circulating without them. Every new documentary, every anniversary retrospective, every time a student writes a paper on nineteen seventies New York crime, the spree gets discussed.
David Berkowitz has been incarcerated since nineteen seventy-seven. He pleaded guilty in nineteen seventy-eight to six murders and received six consecutive sentences of twenty-five years to life, amounting to one hundred and fifty years total, though the figure of three hundred and sixty-five years is sometimes cited in relation to the full range of charges and sentencing recommendations across jurisdictions.
Thirteen months of shootings. A summer that defined itself by panic.
When we talk about cases like this, the question of what we owe to survivors is worth sitting with. Not in a sentimental way.
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