#Carmen Valentine how to
“And the fact that it’s super awkward and people don’t know how to talk about it - I also still don’t know how to talk about it - just makes it that much more difficult and makes the conversation that much harder.”
Schentrup struggles, he said, with “the preconceived notions that people have” about the shooting.
“It layers on a whole bunch of other things to it,” he said, “just having kind of everyone know about it, and maybe not know I was related to it.” And the way she died - and the unusually public nature of it - was strange and confusing. ‘Killing someone else will not bring her back’Ĭarmen’s murder was hard, Schentrup said, for him and his family. “Unfortunately, we never got the chance to do that.” Schentrup was looking forward to what their relationship would be like when they were older, believing they would have the same strong bonds he sees between his parents and their own siblings. When they were younger, Schentrup and his sister were almost best friends, he said, thanks in part to how close they were in age.Īs they grew older and their interests diverged, television remained something they bonded over Schentrup recalled binge-watching the entirety of “Criminal Minds” with Carmen and their younger sister. And she was an enthusiastic fan of comic books, cartoons and British television. She was also a National Merit Scholarship finalist, but Carmen never knew, because her family found out the day after she was killed.īut she was like a lot of other teens, too, with a close-knit group of friends she would always hang out with, Schentrup remembered. Schentrup, who was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Central Florida when his sister was killed, remembers her as a brainy and ambitious teenager, someone whose focus was doing well in school so she could go on to study medicine and eventually conduct research to find a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.Ĭarmen was in the top of her class, her brother said, and was accepted to the University of Florida’s honors program and was also accepted to the University of Washington. “I also feel a certain responsibility to let it be known,” he added, “so people can - if they’re saying, ‘well, I defer to the victims’ - make an informed choice about their own feelings on this issue.” “But I also feel very much that this is something that I believe in, that is in accordance with my values,” said Schentrup, whose opposition to the death penalty extends beyond the case of his sister’s killer to capital punishment as a whole for the same apparent flaws critics point to its legacy as a tool of racial oppression - or its use on people with intellectual disabilities, among others.
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