Police: Census bureau worker Bill Sparkman committed suicide

We’ll have to wait for more details, but AP will be adding a giant asterisk to their earlier reporting on Bill Sparkman, the Census bureau worker who was found hanging in a cemetery in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky. Authorities are now believe he committed suicide:

A census worker found hanging from a tree with the word “fed” scrawled on his chest last September took his own life, police said Tuesday, adding that an inquiry found that he staged his death to look like a homicide.

Bill Sparkman’s naked body was found Sept. 12 near a cemetery in a heavily wooded area of southeastern Kentucky. One of the witnesses who found the body in the Daniel Boone National Forest said the 51-year-old was bound with duct tape, gagged and had an identification badge taped to his neck.

Authorities have said “fed” was likely written in pen.

via Census worker killed himself, police say – Life- msnbc.com.

Let the recriminations begin! A wide range of commentators on the left side of the aisle bellowed that Sparkman’s death was a sign of the anti-government rage that critics of President Obama were spreading around the country like a virus. I am happy to have been in the camp that speculated otherwise. I wasn’t right – I said that if anything, Sparkman was probably found after having been killed by drug runners in Clay County, speculation that was heavily explored by local media in the area as well. I’d rather be wrong about that than wrong for having speculated that Sparkman was the victim of some Rush Limbaugh-listening dittohead who decided to re-enact scenes from ‘Deliverance.’

We still don’t know much about Sparkman, including his politics, although to work for the Census Bureau, I imagine that he couldn’t have been a far right conservative in his thinking. In any event, I doubt that Sparkman was intending to tap into the current political battles of right and left in America with the manner in which he may have staged a suicide. Rather, I imagine he was tapping into Clay County’s reputation for being a marijuana and meth haven where a ‘fed’ is literally someone who will take away your livelihood and put you in prison because they’re probably a Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

But it just goes to show – don’t rush to judgment on crime scenes and attempt to thread every situation into the daily hysteria of the latest political meme.

Now if we could just get everyone to wait until they pass judgment on Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan…

While pundits are noting the politics of this hysterics surrounding this case, I hope they’ll leave Mr. Sparkman out of it. What he did was unquestionably immoral, wrong, and criminal – to stage a suicide and make it look like someone else is responsible can be described in no other terms. But the man leaves behind a family and friends who loved him, and I hope what’s left of his good deeds to his community won’t be dragged through partisan muck in order to establish the unlikely case that he was some sort of brazen left-winger attempting to gin up an Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment in our ongoing politico-kulturkampf. I fear my hopes in this case will be hollow.